Friday in the Fifth Week of Easter, May 15, 2020

John 15:12-17

Jesus said to his disciples: “This is my commandment: love one another as I love you. 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. 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. 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. This I command you: love one another.”

“This is my commandment: love one another as I love you.”  This might have seemed like an odd commandment the moment Jesus gave it.  These men to whom he was speaking had followed him more or less harmoniously for three years.  There had been disputes here and there, but they had subsided.  These men understood that they were bound together in the fellowship of Christ.  However, the Lord immediately defines what “love” means and what he expects of his disciples: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”  Love, then, means the willingness to die for the other.  Love means sacrifice, or, at the very least, the willingness to sacrifice for another.  The image of love is the crucifix.  Christ desires unity among his Apostles after he leaves them, but he wants more than a general agreement on principles.  He wants them to love each other with the love with which he loved them.  This makes them Christians, men worthy of his name.

The Lord characterizes these men as his “friends”, so long as they do as he commands them.  This ought to sound like an odd qualification for a “friend”, for what person commands his friends?  But Jesus does not call them his equals.  Indeed, he says that he formerly called them “slaves”.  He has raised them up by his confiding in them as friends “everything I have heard from the Father.”  But it is he who has done the raising.  He is the undisputed leader, but he chooses to love his followers as his friends.  He emphasizes his primacy by reminding them that, “It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you.”  At this reminder, each of the Apostles must have thought back to the dramatic moment in which he had heard the Lord call him: Peter and Andrew, and James and John, on their boats early in the morning; Matthew at his desk, collecting taxes; Bartholomew, who was sitting under a fig tree, meditating.

An important reason for Jesus reminding them that he had chosen them, not them him, is that this is the reverse for how movements develop.  That is, a person speaks or performs some action or lays out his beliefs in a manifesto, and people are attracted to him or to his beliefs and they begin to follow and even support him.  John the Baptist and the prophets of old acquired followers in this way.  But it is individuals  who make the choice to follow them.  Jesus, by contrast, calls people to himself.  He calls them as one who already knows them and what will be for their good.  Jesus actively desires these particular people.  They are not numbers to him.  And as he has called them and they have responded, he himself is the source of their unity.  This reality makes Christianity very distinct from any other religion or philosophical movement.  And it was not true only for the first followers of Christ; it continues to be true today.  Everyone who is a Christian is so because he or she has been called personally by Christ to be a member of his Body, and the person submits to baptism.  This is true whether the person is an infant or elderly.  Otherwise, a person could apply to be baptized and have his or her own ideas about what belonging to Jesus would mean.  Since Jesus calls first, we accept his invitation on his terms, or not at all.