A New Commandment

“I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.” John 13:34 

In the bible, time after time, Jesus made statements like this that are, as his disciples described, “hard sayings”. These teachings are so counter to our way of thinking that even though they are given to us by Jesus himself, they are difficult for us to accept and even harder to live. It seems that it’s much easier for us to accept what Jesus said to the Pharisees and Sadducees on the same topic in Matthew chapter 22. They asked him, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus replied, “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  

While we wouldn’t consider this commandment easy to accept and live either, it doesn’t compare to his new commandment to love one another as Jesus has loved us. The magnitude of this commandment is so great that we struggle to even take it in. To understand it requires deep thought and prayer, without which we can completely miss the immensity of what Jesus commanded. In the moment, this message is too big for our brains to process, but we shouldn’t feel too bad because the disciples didn’t understand the significance of what Jesus had commanded either.  

If we look at the next few verses in John’s gospel, it seems that Peter didn’t hear what Jesus said at all. Think about it, Jesus had just upped the ante on love from “All In” (as expressed in Matthew 22) to “Infinity” (as expressed in John 13 today). But instead of asking Jesus for more detail to help him understand exactly what he meant, Peter puts the focus on himself. He said to Jesus, “Master, I will lay down my life for you.” Jesus questioned him, saying, “Will you lay down your life for me? Amen amen, I say to you, the cock will not crow before you deny me three times.”  

Today, Peter is making the same mistake he made in Matthew 16, where Jesus rebukes him, saying, “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.” And therein lies the problem, like St. Peter, we often do the same thing. To fully understand and live the teachings of Jesus and his Church, we must intentionally seek to stop thinking as human beings do and strive to start thinking as God does. Because in his new commandment to love one another as he has loved us, Jesus changed the focus of love from a love based on human standards to a love based on the highest standard, God’s standards.  

The ability to love as God loves is a gift and is only possible by the grace and power of God. It’s a love that requires true surrender to the Will of God, recognizing that we are neither worthy nor capable of loving in this way without being fully engaged in a life with Christ, truly striving to grow in our relationship with Jesus every day. 

Priests and Deacons are required to pray from a book called the Breviary several times a day. Many Lay People pray from it as well. The prayers are known as the Divine Office or Liturgy of the Hours. One of the scriptures that comes up quite often in these prayers is from Romans 12:1-2. In it, St. Paul says, “I beg you through the mercy of God to offer your body as a living sacrifice holy and acceptable to God, your spiritual worship. Do not conform yourself to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, so that you may judge what is God’s will, what is good, and pleasing and perfect.” That’s it, that’s how we do it. Through surrender to God and the continual offering of our lives to him, allowing him to renew our minds each day, we can chip away little by little at whatever is keeping us from obeying Jesus’ commandment to love one another as he has loved us.  

Jesus closes today’s gospel by emphasizing the importance of making God number one in our lives so that we may truly live and love in the way God is calling us and be a visible and recognizable light to the world. Jesus said, “This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” You see, Jesus’ command to love one another as he has loved us is not optional; we can’t take it or leave it. It’s a command from Jesus and, I don’t know about you, but when I meet Jesus face to face, I want more than anything for him to recognize me as his disciple. 

There’s no doubt that living our lives for God isn’t easy. Paul and Barnabas warned the disciples in Greece about this in the first reading. They exhorted them to persevere in the faith, saying, “It is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the kingdom of God.” I’m sorry to say it’s just the same today, and with all the distractions and temptations we face in our modern world, the hardships we encounter may be even worse than those the disciples faced. But as Catholics, as members of the Church, Jesus personally started, we should be able, through the Holy Spirit, to overcome any hardship. In the Church, we are blessed to have the fullness of the faith found in Sacred Tradition, the Scriptures, and the teaching authority that Jesus gave the Church. If we take our faith seriously and practice it regularly, Jesus will change our hearts to the point that we actually can love as he loves, not because of our own merit but because he will make us more like him. 

Of course, we can’t earn heaven by being good enough or working hard enough; it doesn’t work that way, but that doesn’t mean that our efforts to draw closer to God are not important and pleasing to him. During our life all of us have put in long hours and worked hard strengthening ourselves, either physically, mentally, or emotionally, to be successful in a sport, in school, in a trade, or a profession. We take pride in our work ethic our efforts and accomplishments but hopefully at some point we realize that God deserves more of us than we have given to any of those things. God made us, sustains us, and deserves all of us all of us, body, mind, and soul. 

Back in the day when I was a student at West High, I was pretty serious about athletics and preparing myself for the sports I was involved in. Unfortunately, I wasn’t as dedicated to my studies, but that’s another topic. The primary reason I was so dedicated to preparing myself to do well in sports was that while I loved competing and especially winning, I really don’t like losing. I mean I really really don’t like to lose. I knew that I wasn’t a great athlete and that if I wasn’t working to get better while my friends and competitors were at home taking it easy, I wasn’t going to be good enough to make the team or win a competition. In the end, even though I worked hard to prepare myself and gave it my all in competition, between my limited talent as well as some injuries, I just had marginal success in the sports I was involved in. I didn’t set any school records and the teams I was on didn’t win any state titles but we did pretty well. 

So what’s my point? What does my participation in High School sports have to do with our life of faith? By participating in sports as I mentioned I learned something about myself, I learned that I loved winning a lot, but I disliked losing even more. I also learned that there is a big difference between losing a competition because I wasn’t prepared as opposed to getting beat by an opponent who performed better than I did. While getting beat wasn’t fun it didn’t compare to how bad I felt if I lost a competition because my opponent was better prepared than me especially if I felt that better preparation on my part could have made the difference.  

At that time in my life, my faith was pretty much an afterthought. It wasn’t important to me unless something bad happened. But as I got older, joined the Catholic Church, got married, and had a family, I started to recognize all the blessings God had given me and continued to give me every day of my life. At some point, I connected the dots of how working to learn more about my faith and striving to live it as best I could, at least for me, was much like preparing to compete in sports. I realized that while losing a competition gave me temporary pain, failing to properly prepare myself and my family to meet Jesus one day, and failing to be prepared to give Jesus my yes if he called me to serve him could have much more serious, or dare I say eternal consequences. 

I began to understand that no matter how much God loved me, he wouldn’t force me to love or serve him. To be prepared for heaven I must freely love him and show it, by the time I spend with him, the way I live my life, and by the way I share the gifts of time, talent, and treasure that he gives me. Anything less could put me at risk of losing the thing we should all desire most, eternity with the Lord in heaven.  

So here we are. Christians on a journey, every one of us, like it or not moving closer to the day we will meet Jesus face to face with each of us at a different place in our relationship with Jesus, in preparation for that day. Our Catholic faith is so deep and rich that there are literally thousands of “Spiritual Exercises” we could use to grow in our faith and love of Christ. Honestly, that’s why he gave us the Church to show us the path to him even through all the joy and tragedy, the peace and turmoil, the blessings and tribulations, the highs and lows of life. No matter where we are in our relationship with Jesus right now, he wants us to know him better. So today, here in his Holy presence, let’s take the first step to making Jesus the most important person in our life so that we may love him and one another as he has loved us. 

Amen.