Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament

Sixth Sunday in Eastertide - May 17, 2009

    The two readings we have heard today from St. John, one from his first Epistle, the other from his Gospel, are fervent exhortations to love. That Epistle hardly speaks about anything but love, and today’s Gospel passage, part of what serves as a kind of Jesus’s last will and testament to his disciples, begins and ends with his plea: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.... This I command you: Love one another.”
    In one sense this call to love may not seem so surprising, not only because these passages are so familiar but also because love is invoked constantly also in our popular culture. When was the last time you heard anyone speak against love? The whole difficulty, of course, is in saying what love is.  It is perhaps easier to say what it is not: Love is not (or at least it is not merely) sentiment or feelings; it is not lust; it is not sex.
    Our two passages go far in telling us what love means as commanded by Jesus when they tell us what the origin of love is and what the standard is by which it is to be measured. The Epistle tells us that “love is of God: anyone who loves is born from God.” Such a person, St. John says, “knows God,” and the reason for this is that “God is love.” “What more could be said!” St. Augustine exclaimed about this statement; “If through all the pages of this Epistle nothing were said in praise of love, if nothing were said in all the pages of the Scriptures, and the only thing we heard from the voice of God’s Spirit were: ‘God is love,’ we would not have to seek anything more.”
    But what does that mean? Have we not just transposed to God our problem of defining love, of saying what it is? The Epistle has anticipated our objection. The very next verse says: “In this was the love of God revealed to us: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might have life through him.” The statement echoes the words of the Gospel: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, ... so that the world might be saved through him,” and St. Paul has his own version: “In this did God show his love for us, that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.”
     All the initiative lies with God. St. John insists on it: “In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us [first] and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.” God’s love is not like ours. We tend to love, we are attracted toward, what is already good and beautiful: a person, a flower, a scene, a work of art. God’s love creates the goodness and beauty that he loves. His love makes things beautiful, makes people beautiful, makes us beautiful and good. While we were still sinners, God saw the beauty that could come to exist in us and loved it into existence. As Jesus says in the Gospel: he no longer calls the disciples slaves; his love makes them his friends as he shares with them all that he has heard from his Father. “You did not choose me,” he says,” I chose you.” Christ’s love creates the love that defines this astounding friendship.
    This already indicates the standard, the criterion, for love. “As the Father loves me, so I also love you,” Jesus says; “This is my commandment, love one another as I love you.” Jesus Christ is the criterion. He is the revelation of what it means to say that “God is love,” and he is the standard against which we are to measure our own love: “Love one another as I love you.” The word love has been brought down from mystic heights and out of the fog of mere feelings to stand firm and clear in the figure of Jesus Christ who, even while we were still sinners, laid down his life out of love for us.
    One occasionally hears the question posed: “What would Jesus do?” Or hear it as almost a command: “Do what Jesus would do!” That’s all well and good, but there is one tremendous difficulty in using it as a criterion: Jesus regularly broke with what people of his time thought religion required of them, and the path that he himself took was one that led him to Calvary. A professor of mine said that unless one is oneself a genius, one should refrain from saying what a genius-thinker would think if he confronted our problems. How can we pretend to see with the depth and breadth, with the clarity and comprehensiveness, that Jesus knew?
    But even more: Can we pretend to love as Jesus did?  Love discerns what people who don’t love can’t see. “Give me someone who loves,” St. Augustine once exclaimed, “and he’ll understand what I’m saying!” In a couple of other places, he used a brief formula that can also be seriously misunderstood: “Love, and do what you will.” This did not and does not mean that anything goes, that anything can be excused simply by saying that one did it out of love. It means, if we put it in terms of today’s readings, that if you love as Christ loved, then what you wish will be what Christ wishes, and you may do what you wish. A heart attuned to Christ’s love will not wish what Christ does not wish, will wish what he wishes. Love as Christ loves, and you may do what you wish.
    The criterion, then, is both external and internal. It is external in the revelation of God’s love in Jesus Christ, in his teachings, in his deeds, in his self-surrender: this is what it means to say that “God is love.” And Christ asks us today to “Remain in my love, remain in this love of mine for you.” Keep it before your minds and in your hearts. But the criterion is also internal: there is no substitute for loving when it comes to the concrete living of the Christian life. External commandments, even the great commandment to love, can only take us so far, whether negatively by telling us where love cannot lie, or positively by pointing toward the path of love. That path is different for every one of us, and only love will be able to discern where we are to go, what we are to do, what the loving thing is.
    It has perhaps occurred to you that it is a very odd thing to command people to love. Is love something under our control, like, say, driving on the right hand side of the road, or stopping at red lights? Such things are easy to command, easy even to obey. But love?  Can I simply decide to love?  One would be apprehensive about a friend who said: “I’m going to go out and fall in love today.” Isn’t that the metaphor for love: beginning to love is a kind of falling. You who are married: Can you say that you decided one day to love the person you eventually married? Is it not perhaps more that one day you discovered, perhaps even as a surprise to yourself, that you were in love, something that your friends may have known before you did? How, then, can love be commanded?
    Well, it can’t be commanded in that sense. But this commandment is not what comes first in the full Gospel message. What comes first is the message that God has loved us: It is not that we loved God first, but that he loved us first. You did not choose me. I chose you. God so loved the world... And what we hear commanded of us today is what God has already given, because, in St. Paul’s words, “love for God has been poured forth into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” You would not be here today if you did not already love God. You would not be trying to live a generous Christian life if you did not already love God. You would not be struggling against doubt or asking God to make himself known if you did not already love God. It may be that, as with the unconscious lover, you need to discover what others may already know: that in fact your heart is already set on God, moving toward him, already loving him. And you should keep as a sure statement: that God never commands what he is unwilling to give.
    Jesus says in today’s Gospel: “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.” He has told us this so that his joy, God’s joy, may be in us, and so that our joy may be fulfilled. Love and joy are here linked, as they are when St. Paul enumerates the fruits of the Holy Spirit: love and joy top his list. You cannot love without joy; to enjoy is to love. Let us pray that we may welcome and cultivate these great gifts of our God.

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