Before you can obey the Lord’s commandment you must first know what it is. In context, the commandment to be kept is Jesus’s “new commandment” as set forth in the previous chapter of Saint John’s Gospel. This “new commandment,” as we heard in our Gospel yesterday, is that, as His disciples, we love one another as He has loved us.1 Esto es claro, ¿si?
Christ’s love, then, is the standard. The Lord’s standard clearly exceeds my ability, even on my best days and even when it comes to my closest relationships. Hence, I must recognize my need for help to love others as Christ loves me. The help God gives me to love beyond my own capacity is grace.
Too often, I am happy whenever I live a day during which I don’t say, do, or in my heart commit some gross violation of the Lord’s command to love. In other words, a day during which there is no egregious sin of commission. Indeed, we spend a lot of time discussing and agonizing over sins of commission.
As a result, we rarely mention sins of omission- those situations in which I could’ve and should’ve done something good but did not. This is reflected in the Act of Contrition that we pray in confession between confessing our sins and receiving absolution: “In choosing to wrong and failing to do good, I have sinned against you, whom I should love above all things.”
In saying this prayer, we recognize that our sins, all of them, are failures to love God above all things. In failing to do good, maybe it’s the case I love my comfort and seek to preserve it by not getting involved.
As Pope Francis noted in the wake of a very defective public exposition of the ordo amoris, one that sought let us off the hook far too easily:
The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan,”2 that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception
This is the fundamental imperative of love: to do good and avoid evil. Focusing exclusively on avoiding evil is like playing not lose instead of playing to win. In 1 Corinthians, Saint Paul urges Christians to “Run so as to win.”3
A secret of the spiritual life, of a Spirit-driven life, is that the more you “do good” out selfless motives, the less inclined you are to “do evil.” “Above all,” scripture teaches, “let your love for one another be intense, because love covers a multitude of sins.”4
As the Lord intimates, it is not the Holy Spirit’s remit to reveal new things. All that God could reveal is revealed in and through Christ. Jesus Christ is the full revelation, the final word of God to man.
It is the Holy Spirit who seeks to bring us to an ever deeper understanding of the full revelation of God in Christ. He does this by constantly reminding us of “all” Lord has told us. Chief among these is a wholehearted love of God, which results in love of neighbor.
According to the scriptures, my love for God can only be a response to God’s love for me: “In this is love” asserts the inspired author of 1 John, “not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.”5 Therefore, he continues: “if God so loved us, we also must love one another.”6
Loving as Christ loves is what it means to be holy. Becoming holy, quite literally, consists of nothing else. "God is love."7 This is what makes the true God different from false, pagan gods, like Hermes and Zeus.
1 John 13:34.↩
2 Pope Francis. Letter of the Holy Father Francis to the Bishops of the United States of America, 10 February 2025; Luke 10:25-37.↩
3 1 Corinthians 9:24.↩
4 1 Peter 4:8.↩
5 1 John 4:10.↩
6 1 John 4:11.↩
7 1 John 4:8.16.↩
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