On the Greatest Love Story of All
May 10, 2026
Rev. Traceymay Kalvaitis
John 14:15-21
[Jesus said,] “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”
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Today’s sermon is titled On the Greatest Love Story of All. I have shared with you a little bit recently about my love story; today I offer you the greatest of all love stories. It is perfect that today we also remember our mothers. One of the few things we all have in common is we all have a mother whether we know them or not. We all have someone who is responsible for, quite literally, growing us within themselves. Our mothers may have provided us with examples of right living to guide us; and our mothers may have provided us with examples of how not to live. Both are equally as valuable. Both examples teach us valuable things about love. So on this mother’s day we turn to a piece of scripture that centers in what is, in my opinion, the purest form of love. We find this love described in the same chapter of John we studied last week. This passage is part of what scholars call the Farewell Discourse. It belongs to a set of teachings Jesus offered just before he was arrested.
In this section of the Farewell Discourse, Jesus promises that “another Advocate” will be coming that will be with us forever. As tempting as it is to focus on this promise, we have a special Sunday coming up at the end of the month, Trinity Sunday, where we will consider more in detail this promise Jesus makes. This week, I’d like to focus on the other messages in this short passage from John, made up of only six verses. In six verses, we hear the word love mentioned five times. We also hear the prepositions in or with six times.
Love is a word, like God, that is used to describe an incredibly wide range of human experience. I love avocados. I really do. But I could live without them. Love of God, the source of all love, I would not want to live without that in my life. To live without God would be to live without love. Unimaginable.
Let’s look more closely at the words for love that are used in this famous passage; having a deeper understanding of the language can give us a deeper understanding of what Jesus may have meant with these words. Remember that Jesus would have been speaking Aramaic; the word for love in Aramaic is khuba (koo-bah). He would have been speaking from a strictly Jewish perspective so khuba (ܚܘܒܐ) would have carried the connection to the Hebrew word for love, ahavah (אַהֲבָה) and yet Jesus’s words were recorded in the book of John in Greek. There are six words for different kinds of love in Greek, but the word used here is agape.** Agape is used 143 times in the Second Testament. Let’s make sure we understand what agape love encompasses. It will help us to know what it does not encompass, as there are other words for those kinds of love. Agape is not romantic love, it is not love of friends, it is not love of family, it is not love of self. Agape is the highest form of love. I will leave it at that and invite you to consider the beautiful fact that there is a word for the highest form of love.
When Jesus speaks of love for humanity, it is agape. When Jesus speaks of love for neighbor, it is agape. When Jesus speaks of love for God, it is agape. The greatest love story of all is agape, the love of God, the love for God, the highest love for one another and it all resides within us, as us. This is the great mystery of what is called the indwelling, the highest love of all that lives within us. Jesus describes the indwelling in our scriptures today. Jesus says, “I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me.” And what are Jesus’s commandments? Love God and love one another. He says this is the greatest command. This is based on ancient Jewish wisdom, from the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. This love is agape, the highest form of love.
Agape is an active love that is not based on just feelings and emotions. Agape is an active love that rises above feelings and emotions. We do not love our neighbor because we like them. We are commanded to love our neighbor regardless of whether we like them or not. Listen to these words from Mendel Kalmenson and Zalman Abraham, authors of an article about the Hebrew word for love, ahavah. Their article is subtitled, “I Give, Therefore I Love.” “The Hebrew word for love is ahavah, which has the root word hav, which meaning to give, revealing that, according to Judaism, giving is at the root of love…True love, then, is not about how you feel in someone else’s presence; it’s about how you make them feel in yours….Love, on the other hand, is strengthened and prolonged with every act of thoughtfulness and selfless giving. This leads us to a second major premise of Jewish love: Love is not primarily about how you feel but about what you do. Famously, the Torah commands us to Love your neighbor as yourself. In relation to this verse, many ask: How can we be commanded to feel something for those we don’t have feelings for? One answer is that the command is not focused on internal feelings at all, but on external actions. One must speak in praise of his neighbor and be concerned for his property, as one is concerned about one’s own property and honor. It is worth noting that nowhere in [the Torah] how one is supposed to feel about their neighbor emotionally. Instead, the commandment [centers on] behavior, as a call to action: speak well of your neighbor, be [as concerned for them as we are for ourselves.] When it comes to loving our neighbors and fellow citizens, our feelings are secondary. What matters most is our actions and how we treat and relate to others in our midst. In love, feelings keep us focused on the self; actions are what connect us to others.”
I will close with a short story and what may be a call to action, a call to ahavah, a call to agape, a call to the highest form of love. This past Wednesday I met with a colleague, Rev. Mark Koyama, minister at the UCC church in Jaffrey. Both of our churches are part of the Monadnock Interfaith Project and the two of us volunteered to work on ideas for representing the surprising numbers of people who are dying in ICE detention centers around the country. The goal is to come up with a visual way that congregations all across New Hampshire can bear witness to these unnecessary deaths.
Rev. Koyoma and I have been meeting together for several weeks, and consulting with other people we know who are experienced in art installations. This past Wednesday Rev. Koyama and I met to try out the idea that seemed the most feasible. Part of my job was to print out the list of detainee deaths during 2025 and thus far in 2026. There are 50 names on the list. The Department of Homeland Security has 90 days to release the names, so it is difficult to know the exact number, but I can tell you that the most recent name on the list is Aled Cabonell Betancourt.*** Aled was a young man from Cuba; he was 27 years old. He was questioned in Miami on Nov. 22nd, found to be without proper documentation, resisted arrest, and (according to his paperwork that is easily accessible online), Aled was charged with a felony under the Laken-Riley Act and he was put on the track for “removal.” On April 12th, 27 year old Aled was found in his cell. The cause of death was death by hanging; Aled used his own bedsheet. It’s all there in the report. Report after report, giving details of what happened to these people, these people who are someone’s child, someone’s parent, someone’s sister or brother. Each one of them, just like us, from a mother. Each of them, just like us, loved by someone, somewhere.
Rev. Koyama and I tore 3” wide strips of black cloth and wrote out the names of those who have died. After the name we wrote their age. One by one we tied the strips of cloth, one beside the next, onto an outstretched rope. The black strips hang down 4 feet, letters in white paint. It took 20 feet of rope to fit the 50 strips of cloth, each representing one human being. The experience we had in creating this is difficult to describe. It was heartbreaking, to be sure. And yet it felt right and good to remember them, to write their names, to consider their age, to read just a bit about their story knowing there is so much more to their story that we will never know.
In closing, Friends, I lift up the mystery of the indwelling, the mystery of God within. Perhaps it is because God dwells within us that love can be expressed in such a wide variety of ways. Perhaps it is because God dwells within us that we are moved to care about the fate of people we have never met. Here’s to the highest form of love we find in Christ. Through Christ we are engaged in the greatest love story ever told. May we be generous givers and gracious receivers of that highest love. So be it. Amen.
*https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/5783136/jewish/Love-Ahavah.htm
**https://biblehub.com/strongs/john/14-21.htm
***https://www.ice.gov/doclib/foia/reports/ddr_CARBONELLBetancourtAled.pdf
****https://www.ice.gov/detain/detainee-death-reporting
Pastoral Prayer
Holy One, I thank you this morning for this practice of prayer. Just how it works, we may never know, but we are grateful to be participants in something deeper, something wider, something far beyond who we are. We extend our prayers over all the world this morning and we call on the highest, purest form of mother love to aid us in the healing of our Selves, the healing of our relationships, and the healing of our planetary home. Give us the courage to pray about anything, about everything. This I pray in Christ’s name. Amen.
Benediction
I leave you with these final words:
For the many ways women share their love, their concern, their wisdom and their time, may they receive abundant strength and clarity from the very heart of God and may the most tender aspects of mothering be an expression of love that each and every one of us, both men and women, can embody, with the grace of God. Amen.