Jesus said to his disciples:
“As the Father loves me, so I also love you.
How does the Father love Jesus? Completely and exhaustively, holding nothing back, giving to Jesus everything that is his own. Some examples:
The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands (see John 3:35).
For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does (see John 5:20).
For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself (see John 5:26).
For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it (see John 5:21).
Jesus is God from God, light from light, true God from true God. Everything he is comes from the Father, from all eternity without beginning. Jesus desires that we open ourselves to receive from his love what he has received from the Father's love. He wants to hold nothing back, and to that end he desires a people who won't pick and choose among his gifts but rather one who will accept all he has to offer.
Remain in my love.
Jesus wants to be for us the source of our very life, the food that sustains us, the power within us that sanctifies us and will one day raise us from the dead. He begins to work this mission of love toward us before we do anything, even while we are yet sinners, and still enemies. But once we become conscious of the offer we are called to embrace it. He lifts the darkness from our eyes so that we can choose to come into the light. But he will allow us, if we insist, to remain in darkness. Let us come into the light and remain there, not running back to the shadows when it reveals more about us than we would prefer.
If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love,
just as I have kept my Father’s commandments
and remain in his love.
The commandments are not an arbitrary test that we must pass to prove our love. The commandments themselves help define the boundaries of love, and tell us how not to transgress those boundaries through selfishness and vice. When we receive the commandments as from a master they may seem onerous and excessive. But when we receive them from a Father who loves us we realize that they are designed for our good, and to ensure our flourishing as human beings. Hopefully our own parents did their best to keep us safe by the rules they set. But perhaps some of those rules were in fact excessive and others not stringent enough. The command of the Lord, however, is perfect. The context of the commandment is always meant to be that of relationship with the one from whom we have it. Our obedience will be lifegiving to the degree that it stems from faith, from trust in the Triune God.
“I have told you this so that
my joy might be in you and
your joy might be complete.”
The letter on the page can lead to death when it is read out of the context of a relationship built on trust. But the Spirit can reveal what the letter is meant to be, a love letter, directions showing the way to life. It can become for us a source of joy even more than for the psalmist who wrote, "I open my mouth and pant, because I long for your commandments" (see Psalm 119:131).
We who know the goodness of the law must still be careful how we present it to others. It is too easy to accidentally disconnect it from the context of relationship. If we forget to base everything on the fact that Jesus loved us first the law will always seem insurmountable, and perhaps even hostile to human freedom.
It is my judgment, therefore,
that we ought to stop troubling the Gentiles who turn to God
Gentiles who turn to God do need to know the commandments, but we ought to keep things simple at first and lead them gradually deeper and deeper on the path of virtue. We must avoid trying to fix their behavior in isolation from their faith in Jesus. As saying goes, we must not try to clean a fish before it is caught. This will also help prevent us from imposing things which have merely been useful for us as absolutes. It will help ensure we do not make ourselves arbiters of the law but show others how to receive from and remain in God's love.
The commandments of God are big enough and sufficiently wise that they can address the whole world, men and women of every race, tribe, and tongue. We ourselves are quite limited and will need to in some sense get out of God's way so that he can love others. But though we risk posing an obstacle to God, we are nevertheless the chosen vehicles for this mission, which we receive from Jesus, who himself received it from the Father. When we approach this plan from a perspective of faith and trust we can experience not only the wisdom of this plan, but the joy that is its goal.
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