The Love Commandment
Scripture John 14:15-21
Reading
If you love me
you will keep my commandments...
the one who has my commandments and keeps them
is the one who loves me; and the one who loves me
will be loved by my Father,
and I will love them and reveal myself to them.
Reflection
This command: “Love one another as I have loved you” follows immediately upon Jesus’ imperative to “Remain in My love”. There is an inseparable bond linking these two activities – activities which must be continuous and simultaneous in every believer. Remaining in My love, be loving to one another. We simply love Love and let Love love through us.
This abiding love of God within us is not something purely mystical then, rather its enduring immanence is closely linked with the ethical command: “Love one another.” Lovers of God are to be mystically-active, loving one anther. The more one is receptive to the inflowing of God’s love within, the more the out-flowing, the overflowing love, will be toward the other. The more one is open to this remaining receptive in God's abundant love, the more one will be attentive to the demands of loving one another.
This abiding God’s love, agape is dynamic, creative, active, generative of more love, more agape. Love can subsist only if it produces more love. Quite clearly then the source and the vitality of all “love of one another” is divine. Love spirals outward from the very heart of the Trinity – from God who is Love. “As the Father has loved Me, so I have loved you, and you, in this very same love, you must love one another.” This loving one another then will be a divine loving, an overflowing from the vital spring of God’s love within us. It is the agape of God made visible. How sweet it is when brothers and sisters love one another like this!
Just how does this transpire within us? We let Love love through us. We allow Love to bind up all the forces of death in us - all those life and love-denying forces that keep us trapped and un-free. We let Love bind up our pride, our greed, our lust, our selfishness and our fear. Pure love casts them into the abyss so that the overflowing love to the other is now a love that is patient, is kind, is not boastful, conceited or resentful. It is a loving one another that hardly even notices the weakness and faults, excuses wrongdoing, easily forgives sins and failures, rejoices readily in the other's good. This love of one another is always able to trust, to hope and to endure whatever comes… and when this love is expressed in its utmost perfection, it spills forth into the giving of one’s life – in Christian martyrdom. “Greater love than this no one has than one lay down one’s life for one’s friends”. And, yes, you are my friends when you love one another like this.
Our love for one another will be evidenced by the extent, intensity and the greatness of God's abiding love. When our openness and receptivity to God's love is great; so will our capacity for loving one another be great. “Show me how much love there is among you and between you and I will tell you how much prayer there is.” (Merton) If you are remaining in My love, you will be loving one another. Loving one another flows naturally and spontaneously from one’s being loved in God.
A community - be it a family a religious community or a solitude community - draws its unity from this divine love, agape. No human, natural, affective love alone will ever be able to reach the heights, the length, the breadth and the depths of this agape love. For all the beauty, strength and consolation that can come from belonging to a human community, it is never sufficient for the fullness that is possible within the community of the Trinity. Abiding then within the Divine Communion of Father-Son-Spirit and the human community of Jesus- Mary-Joseph we come to 'see' and experience such a delightful interaction and communion that starts to grow amongst us. Where there is this agape love, we more easily embrace and welcome all the rich diversity and plurality of individual personalities in our families and communites. For no diversity, no interior strife, no sufferings, trials from within or without, not even our sin, not even our death will be able to separate us from the love of Christ that has gathered us together as ONE ...and is sustaining us together ... as ONE.
A community united in God's Love – remaining loving our Beloved and loving one another is “sign” to the world pointing to a higher transcendent reality:
“See how they love one another
See how they love the neighbor
See how they pray to their God.”
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