6TH SUNDAY OF EASTER – B
John 15:9-17
God is
love! It is the most basic understanding
of God and of love! We can never know
who God is in his Essence but we understand what he is in relations to us, that
is: he is love and he loves us!
We used to understand God in
the classical theology that he is a Pure Being, immutable in its
perfection. But that kind of theological
notion does not really mean anything to us other than a mental exercise. Because God is love, he begets! That is how we understand God the Father
begetting his Son from all eternity:
Because the Father loves and the Son is begotten, the Holy Spirit
becomes the bond of love hence he is the begetting. From this primordial act of love, we have a
glimpse of the Trinity who is a Pure-being-in-love! Therefore the essence of God is love! Because they are three persons loving each
other, there is a perfect communion that overflows unto creation. This is how the world and humanity came into
being. We are the fruits of the overflow
of the self-gifting of the love of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit with each other that
creates all realities and is continuously bringing these realities unto the
Trinitarian communion!
Jesus proclaimed that basic
primordial truth: the Father loved him so he loves us just the same. But being loved is not only a privilege and
a gift, it is a responsibility: being
loved by the Father, Jesus kept the Father’s commandments and remained in his
love. This is what he asks of us: to remain in his love and keep his commandments. Jesus possesses that perfect joy in being
loved by the Father and he wants to share that joy to us. On the day before he died, he left us a new
commandment: "love one another, as I have
loved you!" The standard of love is the
love of God to us. Why do we love? Because we are persons created out of
love! We are loved by the Father and so
he begets us the way he loves his son and begets him. St. John (in the second reading today)
reminds us that “he who loves is begotten by God”. But the love of the Father does not end in
begetting his son, rather in sending him to us as our Saviour. The fruitfulness of begetting the Son is
made through the sacrifice of letting go of him (the Incarnation) for the sake
of humanity. This means that the true
love of the Father is not possessing the Son he loves but by giving him away to
us. sharing the same essence of love
with Father, Jesus understands this when he dispossessed himself of his divine
attributes (Kenosis) by becoming man like us.
Indeed there is no greater love than his love for us when he laid down
his life for us. This is why he asks to
do the same: to lay down our life for our friends.
In the begetting of the Son
by the Father, the fruitfulness of love finds its concrete manifestation in the
mission of the Son when he was sent to us.
When the Father created us in the image of his Son, he also commissioned
us his sons: “to go out and to bear much fruit.” Every single act of goodness is the
incarnation of love as charity to others.
Love is not a noun; it is a
verb, it is an event! This is how we
know what God is: a Person who is madly in love with us and invites us to enter
into this Trinitarian communion of love!
Our love, imperfect it may
be, has two wings: faith and hope! When we love we soar to the heavens whilst
our feet our grounded in the abyss below (Hans Urs von Balthasar); when we do this, we shine the
brightest because we become one with God who is love!
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