The law of love of the Lord of love

 A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (John 15: 12-17) is one of those extracts that we will hopefully be meditating on for the rest of our lives, so rich is it with the teachings of Jesus and glimpses into His very heart. Love one another as I have loved you… no longer do I call you servants… you did not choose me, but I chose you… whatever you ask the Father in my name, He will give it to you. Any one of these phrases or sentences would be meat enough for our reflection but let us focus here on just one.

The new commandment, the mandatum novum, is most associated with the celebrations of Holy Thursday: this is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. We use the word agenda to mean the things that must be done, but this sentence contains the Christian’s agenda and the Christian’s contemplanda: the things the Christian must contemplate. As I have loved you. How has the Lord loved us? We need only look on the events of the incarnation to have an inkling of what that love has been like. Thirty-three years in total, thirty hidden and three in public, the hidden years as much a source for our reflection since they mirror the long and mostly uneventful lives that many of us lead; thirty years of family life, quiet labour, celebrations, the adventures of youth, climbing trees and swimming rivers, Passover nights, a carpenter's workshop, the loss of a beloved stepfather… What was Jesus doing in all these years, as He laid His hand upon the wood in his stepfather’s workshop or as He looked upon the flocks of sheep on the hills around Nazareth, except loving us, casting His eye upon the passing beggar or the distant leper like He casts His eye upon all of sorry humanity, loving these damaged children from the very depths of His heart? What was He doing as He offered His daily prayers to the Father if not lifting up each and every one of us to the loving and forgiving gaze of the Blessed Trinity, to beg for mercy and reconciliation, peace and unity, the restoration of all things in Himself? As I have loved you, He says to the disciples, with the enduring and eternal faithfulness of their Lord and Creator. We cannot come to the end of this mystery. Please God, if we do our bit, we will be contemplating it for the rest of eternity, gazing back in love on the One who first loved us. These are our contemplanda now and always. When we stand on the edge of prayer, unable to take another step forward, or blocked from entrance by the noisy clamour of a restless mind, perhaps we can at least console ourselves that behind the noise or beyond the dry silence lies this limpid, sweet, life-giving mystery of how the Lord has loved us.

But the wonder of this gospel extract is far from over. Now we turn to the new commandment itself: love one another, and - now you know how I love you - love one another as I have loved you. If the phrase as I have loved you told us unending truths about the Man-God Himself, this new commandment tells us two things: first, it tells us what to do, but second, it also tells us who we are.

Every philosophy of life is governed by some norm, an agenda, or some key duty. For the Christian, after loving God, that norm is to love one another. There is a misapprehension going around that the social doctrine of the Church was not developed until the late nineteenth century when Leo XIII published the encyclical Rerum Novarum. Well, Leo's letter applied that social doctrine to the socio-economic circumstances of the time, but it did not found or launch the social doctrine of the Church, far from it. The social doctrine of the Church has been there since the time of the Apostles when the first Christians shared their possessions amongst themselves, literally living out the laws of charity not only towards God but to fellow believers and to unbelievers beyond the community. Over many centuries, this new commandment of love took on a more structured form, and was known even until quite recently under the guise of the spiritual and corporal works of mercy. Instruct the ignorant, counsel the doubtful, comfort the grieving: these were all spiritual works of mercy, ways in which the new commandment was made concrete and real in the circumstances of everyday life. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick: these too were acts of love that Christians could perform in obedience to this new commandment to love one another as He had loved us. To paraphrase Chesterton, this commandment has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and often left untried or neglected. The western world in some ways excels still in this residual obedience to the law of love for it was not paganism or secularism that taught us to care for those in need but the Christian conscience. At the same time, how did westerners ever learn to feed the hungry they see on the TV but neglect, ignore or even loathe the neighbours who live down their own street, or the folk they meet in daily life? On Monday, the gospel invited us to contemplate that great outpouring of the Blessed Trinity that takes form in our souls through the indwelling. This new commandment tells us simply that this outpouring of grace into our hearts is not meant to stop there but to flow through us, making us as it were channels of life to others. As the goodness of God shares itself, so we too are commanded to share ourselves, perhaps even in the most extreme circumstances to the very shedding of our blood. This duty of self-giving will never end, and if it did, it would be a sign that God was no longer God.

And yet, this new commandment is not done with teaching us things. For the second thing which comes to our mind as we contemplate it is how far below its standards we fall. When did any of us truly love our neighbour as Jesus has loved us? When did any of us ever cast on them an eye enlightened by such immense charity? We have cited before on this blog the words of Solzhenitsyn: pride grows on the human heart like lard on a pig. It does this because we humans do not know ourselves, or because we regularly forget who we are. We lie down for the night and rise the following day, often having forgotten the lessons the Lord has so carefully taught us. Our hearts were inflamed, but they have cooled again. The lights we received appear to have dimmed, and we are left only with that fake illumination that wants to remind us of what decent and talented people we are, or else - if we are that way inclined - of how exceptionally bad and useless we are: both judgements, the positive and the negative, skewed by our failure to reconnect again with the Lord of love and the law of love; both judgements proof positive that we have not yet ceded the throne of our hearts to the Lord who loved us so much that He laid down his life for us.

So, this new commandment teaches us about Him, about ourselves as we are, and about ourselves as He intends us to be. The only thing left for us to do now is to assess how much of these teachings we can recall from yesterday, and decide whether today we will learn and live them anew.