Thursday in the Fifth Week of Easter, May 6, 2021

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.”

In the time before grace, God manifested his will for his people by issuing commandments, the failure to obey these often resulting in death.  As a result, some early Gentile Christians believed that the God of the Old Testament was not the God of the New Testament, who was a loving God, and so rejected the writings of the Old Testament.  But it is the same loving God.  The most terrible consequence of the Original Sin was that human nature was severely damaged — warped, if you will, and making humans prone to do their own will rather than God’s.  Promises of eternal life and signs of God’s love did not aid people very much in doing that which was truly for their own good, that is, the will of God.  And so God, in his mercy and love, spoke to his people in their own language and made clear that doing anything other than his will would lead to disaster.  With the arrival of grace, the baptized could be approached in a very different way.  Those who are redeemed have this heavenly aid to assist them in knowing and carrying out God’s will.  The Lord does teach what the failure to do this will be, but it is presented less of a threat than as a natural consequence.  It is, then, the same God, responding to two very different conditions of the human race.  In a way, how a parent speaks to a small child, and then how that parent speaks to the same child as an adolescent or young adult, reflects this.  

“As the Father loves me, so I also love you.”  The Father has spoken from heaven on more than one occasion, “This is my beloved Son.”  The Apostles would also have seen signs of the Father’s love in the power of the Son’s miracles.  Most importantly, they would have known the Father’s love for the Son in the Son’s love for the Father, expressed through his preaching as well as in the many hours of prayer that the Lord devoted to him.  Just as the Lord said to his Apostle Philip, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father”, so we can understand, Whoever has seen the Son’s love has seen the Father’s love — and this both for the Father and for us.  “Remain in my love.”  That is, return my love for you, and you do this “if you keep my commandments”.  We do this with a Model before our eyes: “Just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love.”  Jesus then tells us why he has told us this: “I have told you this so that my joy might be in you.”  The joy of Christ, the ecstasy that fills the Son who ever stands in the presence of his Father.  Out of his own completely gratuitous love for us, he desires us not only to be happy, or to be stupendously happy, but to experience his own happiness, so that “your joy might be complete.”

The Lord raises up those who are faithful to him from creatures who are slaves to their own wills to adopted children and heirs of heaven, to those who inherit heaven and share it with him.