John 13:31-35

At the last supper, when Judas had gone out, Jesus said, "Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, 'Where I am going, you cannot come.' I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."

In today’s gospel reading from John we’re back at the last meal Jesus and his disciples ate together. Do you remember? Just a little over five weeks ago we reenacted it at our foot washing and Eucharist on Maundy Thursday. Our gospel for today doesn’t describe the foot washing or the meal. Instead, it reiterates what the foot washing and the meal were all about.

“I give you a new commandment,” Jesus says to his disciples, “that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

On the one hand, it sounds so simple, and on the other hand, so unachievable. Three little words—love one another—in this case told to the disciples and by extension told to us, and standing next to these three little words, all the examples of how human beings don’t seem to be able to do this. Whether it’s in our own families, in the Church, among different segments within a given society or within the nations of the world, we human beings seem peculiarly unsuited to loving one another.

People are actually more pessimistic now than they used to be about this. In a survey in 2009 (man and woman on the street type intercepts), when asked if they believed war would ever end, nine out of ten people said, no. The reasons given? Most said they believed that it was our human nature to make war.

And so is Jesus’ new commandment to love one another achievable? Is it just plain impossible for the Church and for humankind to do it? Are Jesus’ words; “love one another” just the wish of an obscure and idealistic Palestinian Jew who did not understand the biological impossibility of what he was asking? Or did Jesus know more than we think—about us, about human nature and about not only how to create the ability for us to love one another but also the way to sustain it?

Come with me to Kenya and to the work of Robert Sapolsky. Come with me and learn anew what Jesus might have been up to at the foot washing, at the meal, and in the words of his new commandment to his disciples. It is a trip that will require your curiosity, but most of all, it is a trip that will require your humility.

Robert Sapolsky is a neuroscientist at Stanford who studies and writes about the effect of stress on biology. As a part of his work each summer he studied wild baboons in Kenya. Sapolsky’s choice to study baboons was intentional in that baboons are the textbook example of a highly aggressive, male-dominated society. Baboon troupes, in fact, have a constant baseline of aggression that spills over into social life, so they’re perfect for a neuroscientist interested in the effects of stress.

One particular moment in Sapolsky’s many years of watching baboons changed his life and his beliefs about what human beings might be capable of. It involved the first troupe of baboons he ever watched.

They were a rather typical troupe—dominated by a group of violent alpha males who set the tone for the entire troupe. These dominant males became violent through a predictable hazing ritual when, as young males, they entered the troupe itself. You see, when male baboons reach puberty, they leave their home troupe and go to find another troupe. When he tries to join the new troupe he’s severely rebuffed by the older alpha males who have been there a while—they beat him up and try to run him off. They also discourage the females in the troupe from grooming him—behavior that would give him comfort and solace. This violent behavior with new males perpetuates itself from generation to generation, with all new males becoming acculturated to a kind of violent way of treating others.

So while Sapolsky was watching his first little troupe of baboons, a large tourist lodge opened some miles away. Connected to the lodge, an enormous garbage dump appeared. Another baboon troupe near the dump began feeding at the dump each day. When the dominant males in Sapolsky’s troupe got wind (quite literally) of this, they began going over every morning and fighting the dominant males in the other troupe for the food from the dump. This ritual went on for years.

And then Sapolsky got word from people at the tourist lodge that something was terribly wrong. Some of the animals had gotten sick.

He went over to the area and saw animals in a pitiful state: baboons with hands and feet that were rotting, baboons that were dying. They had contracted tuberculosis by eating infected meat in the dump. While tuberculosis takes a long time to appear in humans, it kills baboons within weeks. And so in a few months all the alpha males from the garbage dump troupe were dead. And one half of all the alpha males in Sapolsky’s troupe died.

And then Sapolsky began noticing changes in some of the behavior in the troupe. “Grooming spiked,” he said. “Adult males actually began grooming each other. This was very odd in that I had only seen 30 seconds of males grooming males in my entire previous 15 years of work!”

Something else was also happening—within Sapolsky, himself. Sapolsky was heartbroken. “Those were my animals,” he said. “I knew each one and it was too painful to keep watching the troupe after so many had died.” And so after noticing the initial changes in the troupe’s behavior after the TB outbreak, Sapolsky decided to stop watching that particular troupe. He moved to another nearby site in Kenya end and began watching a different troupe of baboons.

Six years passed. Sapolsky was in Kenya and wanted to take his fiancé to see where his work in Kenya had started. And so he took her back to the site where his original troupe lived. As they watched, they noticed that much if the kindler, gentler baboon behavior was still there—lots of grooming was going on and not much, if any of the violence that one would observe in a “normal” baboon troupe.

This was when it hit Sapolski.

“There was only one male left who had been there at the TB outbreak. All the rest had come in from the outside from the more typical dog-eat-dog baboon world. ‘Oh my God,’ I said to myself—‘the new guys learned we don’t do stuff like that here.’ This floored me. It was one of the three or four best science moments of my life. How did they unlearn the aggressive behavior they had been brought up with?”

What Sapolsky theorized was that it had to do with how the new males were treated when they first tried to join this troupe. After the TB outbreak, with the dominant males gone, the way that the new males were treated when they tried to enter the troupe had changed. It was all about how the females responded to them. With the dominant males gone, the females were more likely to take a social gamble and groom the new males almost immediately upon their arrival. As a result, the entire pattern of socialization in the troupe had changed. New males were being groomed and taken into the troupe within 6 days versus 3 months in most baboon troupes.

“If treated better, male aggressiveness melts away,” observed Sapolski.

Maybe it’s insulting or just plain ridiculous to think that a neuroscientist’s experience and insights related to one group of animals in Kenya have anything to do with us at all.

Maybe it’s a stretch to think that this story about animals grooming each other and less violent behavior has anything to do with the story of Jesus washing his disciple’s feet, eating a meal with them and giving them a new commandment to love one another.

But maybe, just maybe if you look at these things side by side, we see that Jesus understood that the only way to change the impulse within all of us, male and female alike, toward hostility and aggression, is to treat one another with care that is both emotional and physical, to welcome the stranger with care that is both emotional and physical, to treat the world itself with care that is both emotional and physical.

And maybe, just maybe, though we are a small parish, an obscure little troupe in a strange city that few would call aggressive but many would call unwelcoming, maybe on account of having been ravaged by our own epidemic, the AIDS epidemic, some years ago, maybe we are uniquely equipped to welcome those looking for a troupe to belong to, a place and a people to call their own.

And maybe, just maybe, in a church that is more contentious than loving, more fractured than unified, maybe, just maybe it matters that one little troupe has learned and keeps learning how to love one another, how to care for one another in ways that are both emotional and physical.

And maybe, just maybe, in a world where aggression and hostility sometimes seem to reign, in a world of stress, in a world where wars keep happening, maybe, just maybe, it makes a difference, it has an effect on that world, that one little troupe in one obscure ecclesial tradition, the Episcopal Church, does its part to keep learning how to love one another, how to care for one another in ways that are both emotional and physical.

Works Cited and Consulted

The story of Sapolsky and his work was taken from the October 2, 2009 RadioLab program entitled “New Normal?” Listen to it at
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2009/10/02

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