This is my commandment: love one another as I love you.
One might take issue with this statement, thinking perhaps that love cannot be commanded. But this is false. It is true that love cannot be forced. But it can be commanded because in such a case the choice to obey is still left to the one who is thus commanded. A second possible objection is similar. Say we accept that love can be commanded. We might still say that it ought not to be commanded, but only invited, elicited, or encouraged. After all, is not the imperative form of commandment opposed to the freedom that is necessary for genuine love? And this second objection may be answered in two ways. The first is by analogy. Children can and should be commanded to do what is best, because they might not know what should be done, or might not recognize the importance that it be done. And yet, though it is commanded, when they choose to do it it is still possible that they do it for the sake of the love of their parents. The second possible reason we can give for the importance of commandments is that sometimes suggestions are insufficient guides for our fallen will. As a soldier in the army may benefit from hearing orders rather than suggestions, so to do we benefit from hearing commandments as things necessary rather than optional. It helps our weak wills seek that which is best rather than that which is easiest. An army of conscripts considering the suggestions of their commanding officers is unlikely to do well in battle if they only obey when they find doing so agreeable.
No one has greater love than this,
to lay down one's life for one's friends.
The command of Jesus is what makes it possible for us to love as he loves. His command not only instructs us in what we must do, but also, in virtue of the divine person by whom it is commanded, gives us the grace to carry it out. We need such a command to supersede our egos which will otherwise find every possible reason to avoid the apparent extinction that the giving our lives would seem to imply. We are called to imitate a love so great that if we were not commanded to do it we neither would nor could do it. It is a love which is entirely committed to the love of our neighbors unto their true end and destiny in God. It is love that causes us to desire to make others our friends just as Jesus first made us his friend, so that together we can share the gift of life that Jesus died to give us.
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.
Jesus wants us to understand because he wants us to be involved. He doesn't merely want to use us as inanimate tools to carry out his will. Rather, he wants us to join him as free agents. But that implies that he must make the Father's plan and the desires of his own heart known to us, that we may share in them. All things are directed toward their true ends by the divine will. But creatures with free will and directed one way, irrational animals in another, and inanimate matter in another. A consequence of this is that we, as free creatures, can't just coast or ride the current. Our achieving our destined end requires a response on our part. And yet, though we do have this freedom, it is not something we can use arbitrarily or on a whim. It is not something that begins or ends with us.
It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you
and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain,
so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you.
There is a right way and many wrong ways to use our human freedom. Jesus came to show us the right way. In this he was a true friend, teaching and demonstrating the way we are meant to live, here summarized in the commandment to love as he first loved us. We might imagine that there would be no purpose to human freedom if there was, in the end, only one valid use for that freedom. But it is not so. To be able to freely choose God who freely chose to create us is a great dignity and a high honor. The fact that there are so many other less valuable and illusory choices only illustrates that God himself is the only choice worth making. Obedience to the Father was the bread that gave Jesus strength, the source of his fulfillment. Obedience to Jesus can be the same for us.
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