23 May 2014 - don't settle for less

23 May 2014 - don't settle for less

You are my friends if you do what I command you.

This is perhaps what the disciples were expecting to hear.  This is a paradigm they can fathom and understand.  They are to be valued based on their performance.  They have to earn the love of Jesus.  Or do they?

“This is my commandment: love one another as I love you.
No one has greater love than this,
to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

He commands us to love.  This means that he is actually saying that we must love to be his friends.  This doesn't mean earning his love by loving him.  We don't even choose him first.  He chooses us.  While we are still sinners he dies for us.  While we are still acting as his enemies he already displays the depths of his perfect love for us (cf. Rom. 5:8).  He commands us to love in the sense that it is necessary for a life of friendship with him.  Which, of course, is true of any relationship.  If we want to elevate beyond mercenary relationships where we give only in order to get love is the alternative.  So when Jesus says that we are his friends when we do what he commands us to do it means the opposite of how it sounds at first.  Keeping his command isn't something we do in order to earn something.  It is instead a new and better way of living in relationship.

Jesus is letting us in on the secret of Trinitarian life.  How does it work so well?  Why don't the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit get fed up with one another?  Eternity is a long time to be so close.  On the Cross Jesus reveals this secret to us.

I have called you friends,
because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.

The Cross reveals the selfless love of God.  It reveals a Father willing to offer his Son to save us (cf. Joh. 3:16).  It reveals the Son as the one who does not hold onto his rights but empties himself for us (cf. Phi. 2:6).  Only in love do we see what is the ultimate possibility and calling for our relationships.

No one has greater love than this,
to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

Jesus calls us to lay down our lives not because he needs us to but because we need to.  Selfless love is the only workable paradigm for fulfilled relationships.   We are made in his image and so we need to love like he loves.   We need to get out of our own way.  Self-centeredness always promises a fulfillment that it cannot provide. 

So why does he command us to love, rather than simply inviting us to do so?  In part, it is so that we don't settle for less, for the modes of relationship which we've known so far, which ultimately don't satisfy.  And in part it is so we can be assured of the grace to do what we are commanded.  Jesus never commands what he does not also empower.

This is the source of all commandments.  The Church, like Jesus, commands us to love.  But she does so in a way that is motherly.  Her purpose is not to upset us, like those that go out from her "without any mandate" might do.  Her moral teachings really say only two things.  She says, 'This is what love is.  To do less is not loving.'

‘It is the decision of the Holy Spirit and of us
not to place on you any burden beyond these necessities,

For not letting us settle for less than love let us praise him.

My heart is steadfast, O God; my heart is steadfast;
I will sing and chant praise.
Awake, O my soul; awake, lyre and harp!
I will wake the dawn.