Thursday in the Fifth Week of Easter, May 11, 2023

John 15, 9-11

Jesus said to his disciples: “As the Father loves me, so I also love you. 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 might be in you and your joy might be complete.”

The Lord Jesus shows the connection of love and joy, and that it is love that creates joy.  Those who do not love are incapable of joy, while those who love open themselves to experiencing joy.  As St. John tells us in his First Letter, “Perfect love drives out fear” (1John 4, 18), as it does pride, anger, lust, and the other vices.  These are incompatible with love and make joy impossible.  How do we love so that we may experience this joy?  “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins” (1 John 4, 10).  That is, we are able to love because God first has loved us.  Our love is a response enabled by the knowledge and experience of God’s love, which he shows to us as without limit in sending his Son to expiate our sins.  Through meditation on the love God has for each of us personally we grow in our love for him.  We should understand that our love arises as a response because without the Lord we can do nothing at all — not exist, not breathe, not love.

“As the Father loves me, so I also love you.”  The love of the Son for us is infinite, without limit.  There is nothing he would not do for us, nothing that he has not done for us so that we might be saved.  He practically pleads for us to “remain” in his love, where alone we find fulfillment and joy.  We remain in his love through persevering in the life of faith which includes keeping his commandments that he made for our own good.  He himself gives us the perfect example to follow: “I have kept my Father’s commandments.”  He does this to the point of taking on a human nature in an act of supreme condescension, being born in a lowly stable, being raised in an ignoble village, allowing himself to be baptized as though a lowly sinner, and suffering death at the hands of his own creatures.  “I have told you this so that my joy might be in you and your joy might be complete.”  He does not let us wander about blinding groping for joy but tells us how we might have it, and this joy is to be “complete”, that is, perfected in the ecstasy of heaven.