Today’s Gospel Text: As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in my love. 10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. 11 These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full. 12 "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15 No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. 16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide; so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. 17 This I command you, to love one another. John 15:9-17
Reflection: Jesus’ discourse on love is often the most misunderstood teaching.
We are called to love and the essence of Christianity is indeed love; ask anyone and most of them will describe Christianity as a religion of love.
In the process we have failed to realize that the love of Christianity is not an indiscriminate ideology of love which can be freely interpreted by anyone and anyhow.
Many who practice it like an ideology of love compromise on the faith of Christ and thus given love a different twist and turn.
When Jesus loves us he loves us from an eternal perspective.
His coming to us and taking our nature and then living like us and revealing to us God and his nature and giving us the freedom to address him as our Father and his suffering and death on the cross and his resurrection, tell us a story: the story of God’s love for us.
We cannot say we love people and don’t reach out to them in service and the primary service is not feeding the people with material things but of feeding the world with the word that is able to save us for all eternity – an eternal perspective!
In other words, even if immediate compulsions may compel us to feed them with the material for sustenance, the ultimate has to follow if not begun with.
Christ who loved us as the Father has loved him, proved this love for us by his various actions and ultimately by the death on the cross.
Prayer: May your Love O Lord fill and satisfy us and thus compel us to reach out with your Gospel to others.
Reflection: Jesus’ discourse on love is often the most misunderstood teaching.
We are called to love and the essence of Christianity is indeed love; ask anyone and most of them will describe Christianity as a religion of love.
In the process we have failed to realize that the love of Christianity is not an indiscriminate ideology of love which can be freely interpreted by anyone and anyhow.
Many who practice it like an ideology of love compromise on the faith of Christ and thus given love a different twist and turn.
When Jesus loves us he loves us from an eternal perspective.
His coming to us and taking our nature and then living like us and revealing to us God and his nature and giving us the freedom to address him as our Father and his suffering and death on the cross and his resurrection, tell us a story: the story of God’s love for us.
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. He who believes in him is not condemned; he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. John 3:16-18
We cannot say we love people and don’t reach out to them in service and the primary service is not feeding the people with material things but of feeding the world with the word that is able to save us for all eternity – an eternal perspective!
In other words, even if immediate compulsions may compel us to feed them with the material for sustenance, the ultimate has to follow if not begun with.
Christ who loved us as the Father has loved him, proved this love for us by his various actions and ultimately by the death on the cross.
Prayer: May your Love O Lord fill and satisfy us and thus compel us to reach out with your Gospel to others.
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