Text: Tom Colvin (1925-2000) Tune: Ghana folk song
(For reasons of copyright, I cannot print the hymn, but you can find it in the links)
REFLECTION
Jesus turns everything upside down in these instructions. Love your enemies—and then he elaborates on why we should love them with the kind of reason that is impossible to refute. Then Judge not so you will not be judged.
These sayings give me some trouble. I know I should love my enemies, and understand all of Jesus’ reasons for doing so. But I don’t have the power on my own. What to do? Judge not, also bothers me a lot. I think we have misunderstood this—we are to discern evil in what is around us and look for the good. I think Jesus is talking about the kind of judging one can engage in during gossip sessions. Those can be mean. Jesus is also clear that when we do this, we are often vulnerable to being judged cruelly ourselves. Hoist upon our own petard, as the old meme has it.
He does have a rich bit of comfort to these teachings as well—forgive and you will be forgiven, as his prayer has it. Give and you will be given to, pressed down and running over. There is good news in that.
The only help we have is in turning to one who gives everything generously to us. Jesu, fill us with your love. We cannot give what we do not have. And when we realize that we are empty, then we know we have to be filled. Jesus lives to fill our emptiness and want.
That is why the hymn for today can be such a comfort. It helps us ask for what we need to fulfill his teachings. Sometimes when I hear preachers telling us what we should do for the world, as though we need nothing and the needy are outside our walls, I think of why I came to church—I came out of emptiness, not fullness. I can’t do what the preacher is telling me to do, or for that matter what Jesus is telling me to do without his love.
It is from the Word and Sacrament every Sunday that we receive strength to live on through the week. Jesus’ love is inexhaustible, but it needs to be distributed! I once heard a criticism of many sermons as resembling a talk by a chef about how wonderful his menu was, showing us pictures, talking about its presentation, everything, but then walking away without feeding us. I need to be filled—"Jesu, Jesu, fill us with your love! So I can then serve the neighbors we have from you!”
HYMN INFO
Tom Colvin, originally an engineer who worked in Burma and Singapore, studied theology at Trinity College in Glasgow. in 1954 he was ordained in the Church of Scotland. He went as a missionary to what is now Malawi and then served as a missionary in Cheriponi in southern Ghana. He returned to Malawi where he continued his ministry adding community development to his job. He was associated with the community of Iona, established in 1938 by George MacLeod, where of late the noted John Bell and others continue a revitalized program of worship with an abbey restored in 2021. It dates back to Columba, the Irish missionary who established a community there in 563. Colvin heard this folk tune, a love song, from people who had recently said yes to Jesus and thought the tune would be good for a text on Christian love. As a member of the Iona community he was committed to the them of social justice and this hymn is clearly from that emphasis. Colvin wrote later that as he sat “in the moonlight, I felt it simply had to be about black and white, rich and poor.” He realized how much could be gained when the rich learn from the poor as they serve each other.
The Iona community on the “holy isle” on the west of Scotland and at the Wild Goose Publications in Glasgow, heard the hymn and published in in 1968 in a collection Free to Serve: Hymns from Africa. It quickly became popular around the world.
LINKS
First Plymouth Church Lincoln Nebraska
Hope Publishing
Chris Brunelle
Montana Praise Piano version