Friday in the Fifth Week of Easter, May 7, 2021

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.”  The Lord Jesus has often given commands or counseled others to obey the commandments of the Law, but he identifies “Love one another as I love you” as his own commandment.  Although the full revelation of his love is yet to be revealed on Calvary, Jesus has already shown his boundless love to his Apostles through his sharing his life with them, permitting them to see his miracles, to listen to him at length and to question him away from the crowds, and in his causing their faith to grow so that one day it would move “mountains”, that is, begin the conversion of the world.  But for any of the Apostles who were still unsure of what the his love meant, he clarifies: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”  He had spoken before that he would lay down his life in Jerusalem, and now he tells the Apostles why: he was going to lay down his life — for them.  St. Paul, amazed years later about this, reflected: “For hardly for a just man will another man die: yet perhaps for a good man someone would dare to die. But God proved his love towards us: because when as yet we were sinners according to the time, Christ died for us” (Romans 5, 7-9).  The Apostles at that time still had much to learn about the Lord, but they understood their unworthiness before him.  As Peter said in the beginning of his knowing Jesus, “I am a sinful man” (Luke 5, 8).  Nor do we deceive ourselves as to our righteousness.  We know we have not earned the Lord’s mercy: he gives it to us in his love for us.  Because of our sins we should only rank as his slaves, and in fact to call someone “Lord” in ancient times was to acknowledge oneself as his slave.  But Jesus calls us his “friends”.  He puts us on his own level.  Not only does he free us from slavery but he raises us to friendship.  Among the ancients, this was unheard of.  If a Roman citizen decided to free a slave, the slave then became part of the former master’s household: the former master became his “patron”, but this did not lead to friendship.  The Lord does the impossible for an incomprehensible reason: his free gratuitous love for us.  Having thus raised us, and none of us deserving this, we should be glad for the chance to love another as he commands us, if only to show our gratitude to him.

It is this love for one another that is the way out of the hatred that dominates our society these days.  Legislators can pass all the laws they want, but unless we learn to love, it is for nothing.  Bishops like to get up in public and talk about the evils of racism, for instance, and preach against it, but they do not offer the thing that only the Church can offer: the Lord’s teaching on charity.  If all they offer is what politicians talk about, then they have failed as bishops.