(Audio)
This is the commandment we have from him:
Whoever loves God must also love his brother.
Because the Father loves the Son he also loves all people who bear the image of his Son. We become sons and daughters of the Father in baptism. Even the unbaptized God loves in this way because he wants them, like the prodigal, to come home to the house where they are meant to live as part of his family. Since the Father loves humanity he wants us to love what he loves.
Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is begotten by God,
and everyone who loves the Father
loves also the one begotten by him.
The commandments are guidelines to check ourselves against so that we can be sure that we are loving as we are meant to love. It isn't finally about rules. It is about love. Not that the rules or negotiable. They simply point out the ways that love can go wrong and turn into selfishness. They protect us from deception.
We often find ourselves struggling with the commandments. We find ourselves not loving as we ought. It is at such times that we risk descent into a legalism that is concerned primarily with the letter of the law and not love. This is the minimalism that asks what the least we can do to get by and make it to heaven. It is not the glorious freedom of the children of God. When things get tough we must persevere. But we must not simply struggle. We need God's help.
And his commandments are not burdensome,
for whoever is begotten by God conquers the world.
And the victory that conquers the world is our faith.
It's one thing to talk about victory. But what does it look like?
He unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring glad tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.
We might feel condemned if we ourselves tried to read this passage and claim it for ourselves. We'd think about how we can't possibly manage to keep more than one or two of those things in mind. But Jesus has the confidence that God's Spirit in him has the power to make the passage real through him.
"Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing."
We are called to love. The commandments reveal that the victory does not come through our own strength. Rather, like Jesus, we need the Spirit to fulfill this call.
O God, with your judgment endow the king,
and with your justice, the king's son;
He shall govern your people with justice
and your afflicted ones with judgment.
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