John 15: 9-17
This is my commandment: love one another as I have loved you.
Love. Need more be said? Is this not the heart of the Gospel?
And yet…it is so hard.
Ah, the human experience. We are really good at talking about love, singing about love, writing about love, and wanting love. But when it comes to loving…it is not quite as we imagine. We are both wired for love and sadly inadequate at it. But that we can imagine love gives me hope! Something is at work in us that is more than we can fathom, sometimes more than we can even bear to accept.
Despite our inability and our resistance, the God who is love was there in the beginning, is here now, and will be there in the end—loving. Simply, boldly loving. Love is the life-force of the universe. And at the same time so personal. Jesus’ story tells us that. God loves you and me and the people we don’t like. God is not separate from any speck of creation.
Remain in my love…I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy might be complete.
In our gospel reading, Jesus is saying goodbye to his beloved, and fallible, disciples. My heart is heavy imagining that night. I imagine crying out, what do you mean you are leaving? Don’t go! I love you! And Jesus goes and dies, and I cry out with a sense of incompleteness, wait we’re not finished! And I imagine too feeling regret—I am sorry, forgive me for not loving you more! If only…
Love. It is our deepest longing. And it is that for which life has no other purpose. God enters human history to assure us that we are beloved and to show us that through our loving each other God eternally manifests. For our joy!
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.
Lay down my life—my way of seeing things, my way of doing things for my benefit, my comfort and security, my, my, my. “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself…he humbled himself…to the glory of God” (Phil 2: 5-11). Love is a strange and glorious thing.
It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go bear fruit that will remain…
No one of us began this work. Each one of us can stumble forward. To live for something greater than ourselves. To grow love with our attitudes and life choices. To nurture a space to live where love will abide. To reach outside our self-serving ways to be a friend.
Challenging for sure, but I find encouragement in that Jesus was addressing not one person alone but a community of friends. We are called to be with each other in this great work of love.
—Trish Stefanik
