The Summer of Love: Brotherly Love
So this week I want to talk about a
third Greek word for love. We’ve already covered eros, or romantic love, and
we’ve covered storge, or parental or familial love. And we’ve seen how God’s
love has kind of encompassed both of these. Like with the eros love, his
passion runs deep for us, just like the type of passion we read about in the
song of Solomon. And the parental love, that storge love, is the kind of love
we experience from God because he has called us his adopted children. We are
children of the living God.
Today we’re going to explore a third
type of love, philos love, also known as brotherly love. Now I have two
brothers. I’m the oldest of three boys. Kyle, who just got married, is three
years younger than I am. Jake is nine years younger than me and is a junior at
When we were kids, Kyle and I, of
course, picked on Jake. And one day we told him that every three years, mom and
dad had another kid, and there’s six years between Kyle and Jake because the
kid that was born in between – who we called Pete – wouldn’t do what Kyle and I
said, so we drowned him in the pond. And we told him not to say anything to mom
and dad because they’d just deny it. This went on for quite a while, and Jake
was very obedient to the two of us, although he wouldn’t swim in the pond
anymore. When my parents found out, I don’t remember getting punished, but I do
remember running away as fast as I could and staying in hiding for most of that
afternoon.
Stories like that are pretty common in
my family. There was always something going on between the three of us. And on
top of that, we lived right next to my cousins Adam and Seth, who are younger
than Kyle, but older than Jake. So us five boys had the run of that farm. Adam
and Seth also have a sister named Brittany who is about Jake’s age, and I
always just felt bad for her lot in life. I feel like she was in isolation most
of her childhood.
Boys are just different, you know? I
remember being younger and hearing the phrase “brotherly love,” and thinking,
“brotherly what?” I never really thought of my brothers in those terms. In
terms of love. To me, at that age, love was either for your parents, or what
parents felt for each other, and I knew that I felt differently about my
brothers than I felt about my parents, and what I felt couldn’t be love.
Because most of our signs of affection towards one another involved some sort
of physical pain. Wrestling or playing tricks on each other, noogies, wet
willies, wedgies. These were the things we used to show our affection. Calling
it love just seemed weird. So when I was a kid if someone would have asked me
if I loved my brothers, I probably would have said, “No! Have you seen what I’ve been doing to them? Does
it look like love?”
But I did love them. There’s one
incident in particular that sticks out in my mind, one of my earliest memories.
I was 4 or 5 and Kyle was just learning to walk. And at this time we lived on
CR 23, which connects 224 to RT 12. Real close to
So apparently I did love my brothers,
and still do. So why does it look so different from the other people I love?
Because it’s philos love, brotherly love. It’s a different kind of love that is
appropriate for a different person in my life. I don’t experience the same kind
of love with my brothers as I do with Holly, right? Holly doesn’t appreciate
the noogies and the wedgies.
There are some things about philos
love that I think are unique and special. And let me be clear: philos love
isn’t restricted to your genetic brothers or sisters. This is also known as
friendship love. It’s the kind of love you experience with your best friends. It
just so happens that my brothers have been two of my best friends. But maybe
one of the reasons that my brothers are two of my best friends is that where we
grew up, we were all we had. We lived in isolation on that farm. We had two
neighbors: my grandparents and my cousins. It’s like a commune, really. The
Metzger compound. It was a great place to grow up, but when it came to friends,
there was a pretty severe lack of options. You’ve got your brothers and cousins
to play with until you can drive yourself somewhere. And that’s one of the
unique features of brotherly love: it’s love you feel for that friend who is
all you’ve got. When there are no other options. When that brother, that
friend, is all you have.
Brotherly love is also a very loyal
love. Its what soldiers in war feel for one another. You have that love and
that desire to protect one another. You could be giving someone a hard time in
the morning, but in the afternoon, you’re willing to die for them. It’s this
type of love that makes an older brother stand up for a younger brother who is
getting picked on at school. Philos love is a loyal love.
But philos love is also a very,
sometimes brutally honest love. It doesn’t pull any punches. If your brother
needs corrected, you don’t beat around the bush, you say, “Hey, wise up. You’re
acting like a fool.” You tell them what they need to hear, even when they don’t
want to hear it at all. And philos love can do this maybe better than any type
of love because of its loyalty and its general nature. When you get chastised
by a brother or a friend that you know would take a bullet for you and has
stood by you through some really tough times, then what they say carries a lot
of weight. Because you know that this person loves you and wants only what’s
best for you, and they are able to communicate it in a brutally honest way
because of that.
Your brothers and your sisters and
your friends are going to share with you some of the deepest love you will
experience in your lifetime. But Proverbs 18:24 tells us that there is a friend
who sticks even closer than a brother. Listen again to the scripture for today
and see if you can guess who that friend is:
“This is my commandment, that you love
one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down
one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.
I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what
the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known
to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I
chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so
that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you
these commands so that you may love one another.”
It’s Jesus, right? Jesus is a friend
that sticks closer than a brother. Jesus shares this philos love with us, and
we know this because we see the unique features of philos love in the way in
which Jesus interacts with us.
Jesus is that friend who is there when
there are no other options. When the world has left us behind and has ignored
us. When we feel like we’re on our own. When we’re lonely. When we have no one
else, he calls us his friends. Have you been there before? When you’ve felt
like you are all alone and you’ve got nobody? Jesus says, “I love you. You are
my friends.” Isn’t that awesome? Jesus, the word who was with God at the
beginning of time, through whom all things were created, loves us, and calls us
his friends.
But you know, we always talk about the
unconditional love of Christ. And I believe that his love, as far as his
passionate eros love goes, is unconditional. And his love as far as his storge
parental love goes, is unconditional. But guess what: the philos
friendship/brotherly love of Jesus is NOT unconditional! It is conditional love! Yikes! There is a
condition to being a friend of Jesus. Because being a friend to Jesus isn’t a
right, it’s a privilege. And he says, “You are my friends, IF…” See, there’s a
condition. “You are my friends IF you do what I command you.”
And we say, “Jesus, that’s pretty
tough. I mean, there’s lots of commandments and I mess up all the time. I don’t
see how we could ever be friends.” But what a minute. What commandment is he
talking about? He’s being very specific here:
he has just given them a new commandment, and this is the commandment
that they must follow to be called his friends. He says, “This is my
commandment: that you love one another as I have loved you.” That’s it. That is
the condition to Jesus’ friendship: that we love others the way Christ has
loved us.
And that makes sense, right? Think
about who your friends are. You may have big differences in your lives, but
ultimately, in order for your friendship to truly last and blossom and grow,
you have to have the most important things in your lives in common. One of the
foundations of my friendship with my brothers is a common love for our family,
especially our parents. We all just love spending time together. If we didn’t
have that in common, it would be hard for us to be friends.
In the same way, if we want to be
friends with Jesus, we’d better understand that he loves the whole world. He
created the world and everyone in it. It would be hard to be friends with Jesus
and say to him, “You know, Jesus, I really don’t like any of these people you
created.” You know what his reply would be? “I’m not sure we can be friends,
then, because all these people you say you hate, I’m willing to die for. And I
have died for. And I’d do it all over again if I had to.”
So let me help you make this
connection in case you haven’t been able to see it yet. Jesus wants to be our
friend, but if we’re going to be his friend, we’ve got to love others. And not
only do we have to love others, he says we should love others just as he has
loved us. And he was willing to die for us and for everyone and he says greater
love has no one than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. So if we
want to be friends with Jesus, we have to love others the way Jesus loved us.
And Jesus loved us to the point that he laid down his life for us. So guess
what: if we want to be friends of Jesus, we have to do more than just tolerate
others. We have to love them as much as Jesus loved us. We have to be willing
to lay down our lives for them. We have to be willing to show them the greatest
act of love that anyone ever could show another human being.
So this commandment, this condition to
Jesus’ friendship, is radical and it is extreme and it is scary. Because I
don’t know about you, but I think I’d really like to be a friend of Jesus. I’d
like to share that brotherly love with him. That love that I can always count
on to be there and that love that will be in my face and correct me when I mess
up and that love that will stand up for me when hard times come my way. I want
that more than anything else. But I have to ask myself: “Am I willing to pay
the price? Am I willing to radically love others the way Jesus loves me?”
I’ve been reading the Courier this
last week and their stories on the flood anniversary. And I’m so glad that
they’ve done a story every day on someone who went above and beyond the call of
duty and went out of their way to make sure that others were ok. People who
said, “Others are hurting, and so I’m going to do whatever I can to make things
better for them.” And a lot of you went above and beyond as well. But what if
we went above and beyond every day? What if that’s just how we looked at the
world? What if we spent our lives ready and waiting for an opportunity to love
others for the sake of Christ?
That’s what we’re called to, if we
want that real friendship, brotherly love relationship with Jesus. If you want
to experience the joy of being a friend of God, it starts with being a friend
to others. And not just the people you like, but anyone who has been created in
the image of God. And I know that’s a hard thing to do. Sometimes, people are
just the worst. It’s hard to love the guy who cut you off in traffic. It’s hard
to love the lady in the 10 items or less lane who has two carts. It’s hard to
love the kid on the playground who intentionally pushed your kid off the
swings. But if we are truly friends of Christ, then we realize that Christ died
for even them, for even me. And we are called to love them, even to the point
of laying down our lives for them.
Loving your neighbor is a hard thing
to do. I fail at it a lot. I just do. But Jesus loves them. And I love Jesus.
And I want to love like Jesus. So when I fail, I ask forgiveness, and I try
again. And I’ll be honest, some days are better than others, but even the bad
days are better when you are a friend of God.
Pastor
Dan Metzger
Van
Buren United