“Jesus said unto his disciples, if ye love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever… ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you…”
The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Love, the very bond of Love; moreover he speaks for Jesus who, in this present time, “for a little while,” is absent from us. Though we long to be with Jesus, to see him face to face, we are yet full of the joy of the Holy Spirit. And it is important to realize that his absence is not permanent, nor is it a total absence: he is very much present for us in the Blessed Sacrament – what we miss, ironically, since we have never actually experienced it, is our Lord’s incarnate presence moving among us. And yet we are full of the joy of the Holy Spirit, as St. Paul put it:
“the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.” Romans 5:5
Having proceeded from the Father, through the Son, the Holy Spirit was received fifty days after the resurrection of our Lord. The Holy Spirit is evidence of Jesus’ love especially in his bodily absence; and the Spirit’s presence and work in the Church is a consolation, a comfort, a solace, and a support in our life together. As uplifting and gladdening as the consolation of the Holy Spirit is, Paul says this is only an earnest of things to come:
“In… whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise, which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession…” II Corinthians 1:22
If you buy a house you may be asked to put down “earnest money.” That is an amount, much lower than a down payment, which shows you are acting in “earnest,” acting in good faith. As happy as we may be in the Holy Spirit, this happiness, this consolation is only an “earnest,” compared to the joy our Redeemer has purchased for us. We will get back to the Holy Spirit as the bond of Love in a little while, but right now, I want to concentrate mainly on the first sentence of the Gospel and open it up as well as to bring in our study of Romans:
“Jesus said unto his disciples, if ye love me, keep my commandments.”
But what is love and what does love have to do with his commandments? To begin with we can say our love and his commandments are so entwined for Jesus that they are inseparable; in a sense they are the same thing. Just as Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father,” we my say, “he who has loved with the love of Jesus has kept Jesus’ commandments.” To love Jesus is to obey Jesus and it is absurd to think the two may be separated. Jesus so identified our love for him with keeping his commandants as to be one whole seamless garment with which the Christian is covered at baptism. “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ,” St. Paul declared. Put on Christ, as a seamless garment of love is another way of saying “Obey Christ’s commandments.” Why? Because the commandments of Christ enflesh the love of Christ. Love is Christian behavior. Love is not merely the passions of the heart. You may have passionate emotions for Jesus, it may thrill you to hear his name, you may shed tears over his suffering, but that is no proof of love. The love that Jesus is drawing out of you is the same love that he infused into you at baptism. Again, love is a potency that you are both capable and responsible for turning into an act the upshot of which is Christian behavior. Again, do you want to know what love is? You will not know love by taking a look deep into your heart. You will know what love is by appropriating Jesus’ commandment, which requires action, not navel-gazing, action that frequently, means a struggle against various passions. But it is, according to Paul, a struggle we should have every expectation of winning. Why?
“That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.” Romans 8:4
Last week I pointed out that from the start in Romans Paul declared the Gospel of Jesus Christ to be the power of God for the salvation of the whole world, God’s Gospel, which is about the Son’s faith in and his faithfulness to his Father and how human beings may enter that covenant. Four times, as I said last week, the word for spirit is used in Romans before we get to chapter 8 and only one of those occurrences is a reference to the Holy Spirit though some translators have doubts about that. But then in chapter 8 there is a sudden avalanche of 20 unambiguous references to the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity. Why? As I said last week the reason there are 20 references to the Holy Spirit in Romans 8 is because it is with that chapter that Paul reached the denouement and he drew together the strands of his Roman narrative so that we can see that it is the restoration of the Holy Spirit to man that has brought forth a new epoch – what some of the early Church Father’s call the 8th day of creation. Though the sin of man has made a wasteland of creation, God has heard the bitter groan of the creature and the man and he has responded with his own groaning; “the Spirit itself (making) intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” We are members of Christ’s Church and we have been born again as God’s children, we have been forgiven, pardoned for our sins, and your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who according to Paul enables you to love and obey Christ’s law:
“This is my commandment: Love one another as I have loved you. No man can have greater love than this: to lay down his life for those he loves. And you are the ones I love when you do what I command you.”
When Jesus says, “And you are the ones I love…” he is using the word “philoi,” which is from the word “philos” which means, “to love.” In chapter 8 of Romans St. Paul says that “God lovers” are cared for by God such that all the emerging probabilities and actualities in the world are instrumental to achieving God’s will for your life, which is always your good. Why? Because God love you. “You are my “philoi.” “You are the ones I love.” This is exactly what Jesus said to his disciples, and the meaning of that whole sentence is “You are the ones I love and you will remain in my love because you are safe and secure in me.” When we add in what Paul writes there are two loves: God love us and we love God. And his “philoi” is no esoteric group within the Christian community. Jesus’ death, which is his grand act of love, brought forth the gift of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit begets children to God. The “philoi,” the beloved of Jesus, are all Christians.
“And you are the ones I love when you do what I command you.”
“When you do what I command you,” – I will love you. If you don’t, I will not love you.” No! That is not what Jesus is saying. That would lead us to think that the better I behaved, the more he loves me. But that would be to mistake the end for a means. “When you do what I command you” is not a means to an end. No. Obeying Jesus’ commandments does not make one a beloved disciple. Nor is such obedience a test of whether or not one is loved by Jesus. After all, the very Apostles that he would have been speaking to in present time in this passage were hardly to live up to his commandments. Not every one is a Judas; but they hardly kept his commandments. And yet he came to them after his resurrection. No it is not that Jesus loves us because we are good, “when you do what I command” is not simply keeping a set of moral precepts as an end in itself; it is rather the whole way of a Christian’s life in loving union with Jesus Christ and his Church.
“This is my commandment: Love one another as I have loved you. No man can have greater love than this: to lay down his life for those he loves.”
I also want you to be aware of a procession of love that preceded this: The Father loves his Son, the Word, the Logos: “In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God. And the Word was God.” The Word, the Son proceeds from the Father’s bosom, from his heart, from his interior life. John put it this way: “No man hath seen God at any time; the only-begotten God (the Word) who is coming to us from the heart, from the bosom, from inside of the Father has made him known.” The word John uses for “made known” is literally the word we could translate as “exegesis.” The Word is the exegete and the exegesis of the Father. The word literally means “to draw out,” the idea being that an exegete draws out the meaning of a text. In this usage it means that as the Word is in procession from the Father he draws out God’s full meaning, the perfect interpretation of the Father. When the Word came forth he was made flesh and the Blessed Virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus, the Word made flesh. Jesus loves us, his disciples – and we love one another. I also want you to be aware that something like that procession goes on in your life as a person everyday. But more about that later.
The Father loves Jesus – Jesus loves us, his disciples – and we are to love one another. This is a matter of behavior. Love of this sort is not about feelings. The Greeks said feelings are like the weather; one day it is stormy and the next day it is bright and shinny. You have no control over the weather and you have no control over what you feel. One day you wake up feeling stormy and another day you wake up feeling all sunny. You may not control your feeling, but you do have control over your behavior. Yes you do. You are not at the mercy of your feelings. You cannot will away an electrical storm, but you don’t have to go fly a kite in the middle of it. Love as Christian behavior liberates you from what may be the tyranny of feelings.
Here’s the commandment:
“Love one another as I have loved you. No man can have greater love than this: to lay down his life for those he loves.”
Now, let me ask you this: Do you love the people in your parish that much? That is what Jesus and the apostles have in mind. Would you die for them? Now I happened to believe that it is highly probable that you would give your life for another Christian because I think most of you do love one another such that if push came to shove most of us would rise to a heroic level of self-sacrifice. I believe most of you would do that. But here’s another proposition: If we love one another, such that we are willing to die for one another, how ought we to live with one another before that happens? How does the fact that you will follow Jesus to the death for one another inform the way you live with one another right now?
St. Paul does not shy away from giving us direction. There are attitudes and behaviors that militate against love: “immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery…” How are we all doing so far? Any sorcery going on? No immorality? No idolatry? Good.
St Paul goes on to say that we have to stay away from: “gossip, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, a political spirit, envy and drunkenness…” Now how are we doing? Gossip shows up in one way or another in all the epistles in the New Testament. I don’t think that a loving Christian would gossip, tell lies, defame and slander another Christian’s character. And it is hard for me to believe that another Christian would be able to listen to such gossip.
And here is what Love looks like: “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control… Let us have no self-conceit, no provoking of one another, no envy of one another…” That is the second mention of envy and if you look at other lists in the New Testament given by other Apostles you will see that envy makes all the lists. Why? Envy is destructive to any community because envy is pure self-regard. There you have it; practical direction from St. Paul for loving Jesus and following his commandments.
“Jesus said unto his disciples, if ye love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever… ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you…”