Jenny kiss’d me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,
Say I’m growing old, but add
Jenny kiss’d me
What is it is it that we remember about people that we have loved. It could be a kiss, the last kiss before leaving, the first kiss in a lifetime love-affair, the farewell kiss at a death bed. But for most of us when we try to member a person absent from us it is quite homely things. I encountered Sister Francis Anne while I was in London and remembered immediately that at the end of the day in the Priory at Walsingham she would, unasked, make me a mug of Horlicks. A nephew who had an untimely death was a holy and very kind man but in my iconic view of him it was the funny turns of phrase when was a child. I remember that he called flowers daisylions. Humour, quaintness, facial expressions. Gershwin captured it in one of his most famous numbers The Memory lingers on.
The way you wear your hat
The way you sip your tea
The memory of all that
No they can’t take that away from me
The way your smile just beams
The way you sing off key
The way you haunt my dreams
No, no they can’t take that away from me
We may never never meet again, on that bumpy road to love
Still I’ll always, always keep the memory of
The way you hold your knife
The way we danced till three
The way you changed my life
No, no they can’t take that away from me
No, they can’t take that away from me
It was because I was asking myself
Why on this the Fifth Sunday in Easter are we reading about the Last Supper? that I began thinking of memories. We have heard that Judas has just left and we are recalling the night in which the passion of Christ is about to begin. Surely we have been through all that in Holy Week. We shared in the sorrow, we witnessed the dereliction, we recalled the awful moment of his death. But then we rang bells, we sang Gloria in Excelsis we shouted Alleluia, we hugged each other. We are still in Easter, why recall that time of sadness?
When we study the Fourth Gospel we find ourselves in a world of ambiguity where a story or a saying may have several layers of meaning and a message or even a name may have several meanings.
We call these passages from John 13 and following the Last Discourse – Jesus final words to his disciples. They remind us of other famous speeches of departure – Socrates, or the Morte D’Arthur or Rupert Brooke ‘If I should die think only this of me…’
But John made his record of the Good News late in the apostolic age. He had not only crucifixion and resurrection in his view. He had the memories of all the first witnesses who also experienced Pentecost, Ascension and the life in the Spirit that followed.
So when we hear Jesus speaking of his departure it is not in a voice of despair – it is a voice confident that he is doing his Father’s will.
Jesus is trying to reassure the disciples. There will come a time when he will not be visibly present to them. Yet he will never be absent from them while they love each other: ‘My little children I shall not be with you much longer. I give you a new commandment: love one another; just as I have loved yo, you must also love one another.’
What would be strongest in their memory of Jesus is how he loved them. John says it in his letter ‘we love him because he first loved us. There is a richness in the phrase ‘as I have loved you’ when they remember how he loved them they become like him because they see him as he is. The love of Jesus is first a human love because we would not comprehend him in h you and yet you do not know me.is divine glory. But he replies to the plea ‘show us the Father’ with ‘Have I been so long with you and still you do not know me?’ when Jesus loves us it is the Father’s love that we are given. When he does anything for us or in us it is in the Father’s name.
So when we hear his words in today’s Good News ‘I give you a new command’ ‘Love one another’ it is us that are being commanded. ‘As I have loved you’ He has loved us with the same love as the Father had when he sent him to us. But we can only love with such tremendous love when we become humble enough to receive.
Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.
“A guest,” I answer’d, “worthy to be here”;
Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.”
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
“Who made the eyes but I?”
“Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.”
“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”
“My dear, then I will serve.”
“You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.”
So I did sit and eat.