Reflection

Thinking About the Gospel
6^th Sunday in Ordinary Time
May 5, 2024
John 15:9-17

Jesus said to his disciples: “As the Father loves me, so I also love you.  Remain in my love.  If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love.  “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy might be complete. This is my commandment:love one another as I love you.  No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.  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.  I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.  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.  This I command you: love one another.”

Sometimes a gospel passage can seem little more than a string of cliches encouraging generic do-goodism.  It’s easy to read a line or so of such scripture and skip ahead saying, I know this stuff; what’s next?  We could react that way to this passage.  But, doing that, we’d miss a lot.

John composed his gospel considerably later than Mark, Matthew and Luke.  Decades before he wrote, Roman armies had destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple.  Judaism had gone from a Temple-centered religion to one practiced in small, dispersed communities.  Its worship no longer revolved around huge sacrificial rituals and gatherings but had retreated to small, dispersed gathering places of prayer and study.  Jewish communities in  these synagogues developed a tense, often hostile relationship with those who persisted in believing that Jesus had been the Messiah. Eventually they expelled these Christians from their gatherings.  

As the years slipped by Jesus did not return to usher in the Reign of God as his followers had expected.  New people, some of them not Jews but Romans and Greeks, joined their number.  Estranged from their Jewish brothers and sisters and watching their older members who’d known Jesus and the first disciples die, Christians began to experience doubts and divisions.  John’s community realized that it had to develop new ways of speaking about its faith that were both true to the gospel they had received but also met the needs of their new circumstances and members.  Fortunately John and his community had done much praying and reflecting on the previous gospels so that they were up to the challenge.

John’s Gospel placed the experience of Jesus within the larger story of God’s creating the world and guiding it to fulfillment.  It viewed Jesus’ life of love within the  context of the Father’s continuing, unconditional love.  That divine love is the energy of all life and creation.  It’s by trusting and spreading that love that creation advances.  It was to free the world shackled by its inability to believe and trust in God’s love that God entered the world revealing his union with it.  That’s the story of Jesus that John’s gospel told his generation.

Most of us would be slow to link the words joy and commandments in the same sentence.  But the fact that Jesus did just that and spoke at length of their relationship gives us pause and invites us to look closely at how he used the words.

John’s gospel teaches that Jesus had two commandments, or essential behaviors, that were necessary in his followers.  The first was that they had to have faith in him.  This meant he meant that they had to understand that his life embodied God’s relationship with the world.  As he told Philip at their last meal together, Don’t you realize, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” [John 14:9]   Jesus wasn’t trying to lay claim to deference or worship.  He was saying, When you see how totally I’m giving my life in loving service to you, you are witnessing my Father’s total dedication to you.  Understanding that is everything.Jesus’ second 

commandment was that, because they had experienced in him God’s absolute love for them, the disciples were free to embody the same divine love that Jesus personified in their relationships with each other and their world.  Immediately after telling Philip that he embodied the Father’s love Jesus  added, “I assure you, that whoever believes in me will do the works that I do, and will do greater ones than these . . . .”  He wasn’t making a demand on the disciples.  He was saying that their experience of God’s total love in him would free them to love others in the same way.  The ability to live with loving-justice for all that comes from experiencing God’s unqualified love in Jesus.  That experience renewed the disciples’ God-given freedom to live as fully human beings that was humanity’s birth-right from the beginning.  In his parable of the good shepherd Jesus explained, “I came so that [you] might have life and have it more abundantly.” [John 10:10]   

The joy Jesus willed for his followers was the freedom to advance humanity’s journey into God’s Future.  

The vision and promise of this gospel raises the discussion of freedom way beyond the all-too-common “my right to do as I want.”  It’s worth some time in prayerful thought.