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.
Jesus loved us first. He now desires that we remain in his love. We do this by obediently loving in the same way that he first loved us. We are commanded to let the love that found us and saved us to flow through us to others. Just as Jesus loved us with a self-sacrificial love so too are we called to lay down our lives for one another. The love of Jesus for us transformed into friends of God where before we were once not even servants but enemies. He proved his love for us in that even when we were still hostile toward him and unable to move a single step in his direction he himself crossed the distance to us. Our hearts were closed to him, unable to recognize our need for the gift he desired to give, but he loved us anyway.
You are my friends if you do what I command you.
I no longer call you slaves,
because a slave does not know what his master is doing.
I have called you friends,
because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.
Jesus made us his friends by teaching us what love really is. He demonstrated in time and space the love that was also the inner logic of his divine life with the Father. The cross was Jesus demonstrating in history that he loved us just as the Father loved him. It was a visible and verifiable revelation of the fact that "God is love". As friends of Jesus we learn that this love is at the center of existence, the very thing that "moves the sun and the other stars" as Dante wrote. In order to abide in friendship with Jesus we must live lives rooted in this love. His command is thus not merely that we offer some proof of our fidelity, but a call to make ourselves correspond to reality at the deepest level.
In this is love:
not that we have loved God, but that he loved us
and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.
Our response to the commandment of Jesus is never primary or first. It does not make us worthy of his love or his friendship. It is rather a consequence of the fact that his love has already done so that means that we are now called to accept and embrace that gift. We are made capable of bearing fruit that remains not because of our own initiative but precisely because it was he who chose us and appointed us to do so.
Jesus desires us to live as his friends and so be filled with his joy. This is the joy that clearly defined the life of the early Church as seen in the book of Acts. But it is not meant to be an artifact of the past. The Holy Spirit desires to fall afresh on us with blessings that are ever new. When this happens we too, like the believers who accompanied Peter, will be "astounded" as we see our world transformed.
While Peter was still speaking these things,
the Holy Spirit fell upon all who were listening to the word.
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