If You Love Me

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” We hear these words in the middle of the great departing speech of Jesus, meant to comfort his disciples before he leaves them. But here we could almost doubt whether this speech is actually a speech of comfort, or rather an exhortation. Christ says “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” and he will ask for the gift of the spirit, and again he says, “he who loves me will be loved by my Father.” It sounds as though the gift of the spirit, and God’s love for us, depends on our love for him, depends on our keeping the commandments. But what about when we make mistakes, if we at some point don’t keep Jesus’ commandments, if we fail in love? Will we then be no longer loved by the Father? And this is supposed to be a joyful message? What is up with this?

While not entirely off the mark, this would be a misunderstanding of this weekend’s Gospel message. The Gospel surely presents us here with a call to love, a call that can be, and often is challenging. But above all, it presents us with a gift. In this incredibly complex web of loving and being loved, giving and receiving, a friendship is depicted that actually exceeds all description. Jesus is telling us: God is not a vending machine, in which we throw requests from time to time to get something from Him. He is not a fundamental energy of love that is simply there and radiates blindly, without any interaction. He is a personal lover, and offers us not only His love, but also friendship. This is the great message of the Gospel: we are invited to be friends with God Himself. And friendship is always a mutual relationship, which must be accepted and fostered.

Friendship means meeting each other, sharing experiences with each other, spending time together. If I were to never chat with friends, never do anything with them, never communicate with them, our friendship would gradually dissolve. Here Jesus makes a truly great promise. He promises that this meeting with Him and His Father is possible, even after he has gone from us. “Whoever loves me… I will reveal myself to them.”

This meeting with Christ occurs in different ways. We meet him in the daily contact with one another. We will all, every one of us, be surprised and astonished how truly, how literally Christ meant, “As you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.” We meet Christ through faith and in the power of the Holy Spirit, who “remains with us and will be in us,” as we hear in the Gospel. We also meet Him in prayer.

In a special way we encounter Christ in the celebration of the Eucharist. There is fulfilled in a special manner Jesus’ words of comfort: “You will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” In this celebration we anticipate the future, actually unimaginable meeting that “God has prepared for those who love him.” In this life we will never wholly reach the peace and happiness that we really desire, but when we receive Jesus lovingly in the Eucharist, we already participate in a mysterious fashion in this infinite happiness. We can have an inkling what it means to be embraced by an infinite love that never abandons us and that also unites us most closely to one another

May we pray for the grace to ever more realize and appreciate this gift of the Eucharist, this veiled encounter with Jesus Christ, and thereby to grow in friendship with him.