The
readings today have a fairly clear theme of love that is being talked about
today. We hear today about how God is
love and we hear Jesus giving us the commandment to remain in His love and to
love one another as He has loved us.
These are all phrases that we have probably all heard many times before. We are quite used to hearing the word “love”
being used when talking about God and Jesus.
But what does it mean to say that we are to love as Christ has loved us? What does it mean that God is love? What does it mean to love?
To love is
more than just some emotion that we have.
Whether we are happy, or surprised, or sad, or angry, or whatever, we
have very little control over what emotions we experience. We can't control if we are happy or angry: we
can only control how we respond to that emotion. Love, on the other hand, takes an act of our
free will. To love someone means that we
will the good of the other. In other
words, we choose to do what is best for the other. So, to love is not something that just
happens outside of our control, but something we must choose to do freely.
Love is not
something that can be forced. We cannot force anyone to love another
human. I have had various children and
teens ask me why there is so much sin in the world. Many times they will ask, “Why doesn't God
just make everyone follow the rules and be nice to each other?” I explain that in order for God to force us
to not sin, He would also have to force us to love Him, because we would no
longer have the freedom to choose between right or wrong. I also try to have the students imagine if we
were to invent a robot that could do different things for us. Maybe it could do chores for us and do tasks
that nobody wants to do or do the things that are too dangerous to do. We can also imagine that we could program the
robot to say, “I love you”. We could
program it to say encouraging things to us.
We could even make it do random things around the house for us, like a
real loving person would do. Maybe it
could even do romantic things for us. I
tell the students that in the end, we could make the robot as realistic and as
romantic as technology allows us, but it would never actually love us. Those words of “I love you” are only programmed
words. Its actions are only programmed
actions. It cannot choose to do what is
best for any of us.
Therefore,
when the Scriptures talk about love, they are clearly talking about choosing to
do good for others and choosing what is right for them. In our Second Reading today, John gives some
often quoted lines about God. He starts
out by saying, “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God”. He then says later, “Whoever is without love
does not know God, for God is love.”
When we think about what we know about love and when we look at what
Sacred Scripture tells us about God, can there be any doubt in our minds about
the truth that God is love? When we
consider that the Book of Genesis describes how God created the earth and the
sky and the oceans and the plants and animals that live there and saw how good
is was, and created humans beings and saw how very good it was, we can
clearly see that God cares about our good and our happiness. God truly is love.
Well, if
God the Father is love, then it only makes sense that we can say the same thing
about the Son. “As the Father loves me,
so I also love you. Remain in my love”,
Jesus tells us. He goes on to tell us to
keep His commandments so that we can remain in His love and that by doing this
we will have complete joy. Not just the
simple joy that a person may have as they do their favorite activities or hang
around their favorite people, but the true joy that we will only find in
Heaven. Jesus finally gives what I
consider the clincher: “This is my
commandment: love one another as I love you”.
We are to love: not to the best of our ability, not just when we think
of it, not just those who love us back, but to love as Christ loves us. And we only have to look at a Crucifix to know
how much He loves us. As He points out,
laying down one's life for one's friends is the greatest love there is. Christ is not saying that we must all die by
crucifixion or that we must all die a violent death, but He is saying that when
we love, we give of ourselves for the sake of the one that we love.
If there
was any doubt left in our minds of Jesus' love for us, He goes on to explain
that our relationship with Him is not of a slave or a servant to a master. He considers us His friends. This is pretty significant when think about
it. For centuries before Christ, people
considered themselves as the slaves (or at best the servants) of gods and
goddesses. Even the Israelites sometimes
refer to themselves as servants of God.
But here, Jesus is saying that He no longer calls us slaves. Slaves and servants have no benefits from the
master. The master confides nothing in
his or her slaves. Even if the master is
kind and benevolent, the slave is still a slave and has no freedom or rights. Jesus clearly states, “I call you friends,
because I have told you everything that I have heard from my Father”. Christ shares with His Apostles and all of us
many wonderful things about God, about Heaven, and about His relationship with
the Father. He does not keep that
information from us, but tells us about this so that we might be friends and
that we can love each other freely.
Friends care about each other and want what is best for the other. Christ wants us in Heaven so we can be there
for eternity.
Christ
loves us. It can be easy to kind of
brush that fact aside and think that God loves everybody. But remember, love is a choice. Christ has chosen to love each of us. Let us rejoice in that, and let us strive to
love those around us as well. Let us
love, as Christ has loved us.
