Sunday, May 5, is the Sixth Sunday of Easter. Mass readings: Acts 10:25-26, 34-35, 44-48; Psalm 98:1, 2-3, 3-4; 1 John 4:7-10; John 15:9-17.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus cuts right through the modern Western tendency to place love in opposition with law and law in opposition with joy. Jesus joins all three concepts and summons us to a new attitude.
Connections
Jesus says, “Remain in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy might be complete.”
Whereas the modern world disconnects law from love, Jesus links them. How do we both experience and show love? Jesus says that we do so by keeping his commandments. He sets forth a vision whereby we, having experienced God’s love, desire and rejoice in his commands. We also show love to the Lord through this very obedience and joyful adherence to his commands. This loving obedience goes even further by setting forth an abundant joy through the very keeping of those commands. Many who strive to keep the Lord’s commands can testify to the joy of this. There is no safer and joyful place in this life than inside the protective walls of God’s law. Sin complicates and ruins everything.
Core
The Lord says, “This is my commandment: Love one another as I have loved you.”
Note that the keeping of the commandments begins with the experience of God’s love. Jesus says, love “as I have loved you.” Have you experienced this love? Many who hurt others have been hurt themselves. Whatever our past experiences, the Lord invites us to ponder his love for us manifest in his death and resurrection for us. Make this a meditation and ask an anointing of the Holy Spirit. Then we can love others as he loves us. We must receive this as a gift from the Lord.
Camaraderie
Jesus also links friendship to the knowledge of his law. He says, “I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.”
Here is another connection Jesus makes that the modern world rarely does: The world thinks of rules, laws and commandments in terms of slavery and subservience. Jesus, however, links these to friendship. A friend knows what his friend is about and gladly seeks to understand and support him. Scripture says, “Happy are we, O Israel, for what pleases God is known to us” (Baruch 4:4). True friendship means seeking to know and understand one’s friend and to accomplish what is important to him. Many today call themselves friends of Jesus but give him little more than lip service. A true friend of Jesus is delighted to know his will and to accomplish it.
Call
Jesus says, “It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you.”
In these lines, we are reminded that the Lord, who has chosen us, can and will equip us to live his law, to bear fruit in the keeping of the commandments, and to become someone who the Father can trust with blessings. To be rebellious and resentful is to become untrustworthy of further blessings, but, here again, the Lord stresses that the keeping of the commandments is linked to love and to further blessings.
Love connects us to the Lord, his Law and each other.