Easter 6

Easter 6 (John 15:9-17) Abide in My love.

9 “As the Father loved Me, I also have loved you; abide in My love.
Jesus brings into the world Divine love. Jesus doesn’t just speak about that love. He just doesn’t offer an opinion about that love. Jesus is that love personified. Jesus manifests Divine love in all that he teaches and in every action he takes. He is the co-eternal Beloved of the Eternal Father whose essential being is steadfast, holy, unconditional 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.

All of the commandments Moses brought into the world derive from and express the universal, infinite and eternal love of the universal, infinite and eternal Father. The co-eternal Beloved unifies his divinity with our humanity never to be divided from us. He is one with us in his humanity even as he is one with the eternal Father in his divinity. As the Son is one with the Father in love so the Son is one with humanity in love. It is that love that fulfills the Law and the commandments. It is that love the Son offers each of us to transform our desires so that we can make the real choice to live in love, by love and through love. As we live and move and have our being in Divine love we discover a new desire to fulfill the commandments Jesus gives us.

11 “These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full.
Is it as we live and move and have our being in the love of the Beloved that we experience joy. Unlike pleasure or happiness, joy is not subject to the external stimuli of our senses. Joy proceeds from the living waters of the Holy Spirit who dwells within us through our union with the Beloved. The joy of the Beloved is the joy of the infinite and eternal Triune God: the One who loves, the Beloved, the Love that forms their essential being. Union with the Father, through the Son by the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit totally immerses the soul into the fountain of joy the Beloved has always and will always share with the Father and pour forth into the creation.

12 This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
Jesus takes within himself the 616 commandments Moses gave and fulfills them. Jesus transforms these commandments from within the place of their original source. He then distills these commandments and re presents them to us in three main principles of love: Love God (through worship) Love others (through compassion) love yourself (through a commitment to personal transformation in holiness).

13 Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.
Divine love is steadfast (unwavering), holy (devoted to the Good), unconditional (not dependent on any external terms or conditions) and sacrificial (giving from the place of Divine Abundance). Divine love incarnate in Jesus is sacrificial in its devotion to the principles and personification of love. This is the love Jesus is.

14 You are My friends if you do whatever I command you. 15 No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you.

The meaning and purpose of human existence is to be the forever friend of Jesus Christ. In Jesus, God the Father calls all of us and each of us to the beloved of the co-eternal Beloved. As we make a real choice to enter into that forever friendship through the waters of baptism and nurture that forever friendship in the blessed sacrament of Holy Communion we become more of who the Blessed Trinity created us to be.
Jesus does not relate to humanity from within the categories of command and control or rewards and punishments. Jesus just doesn’t speak of love or demonstrate love- He is Love. He invites us into a new life which is the Triune Life of God. And, he transforms our desires to enter into a new way of living in his forever friendship with us.

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 remain, that whatever you ask the Father in My name He may give you.

We can choose to enter into the new relationship with God in Christ. As we grow into that relationship we slowly begin to realize Christ chose to enter into that relationship with us. Our species made an original choice to say “no” to that relationship. The Bible is a brutally honest account of the consequences of that original choice. Humanity now lives in a state of separation from God, each other and the truth of who God created each of us to be as individuals.

The Beloved chose to set aside his divine prerogatives to come to Earth and offer humanity another choice. The Beloved was not willing to take humanity’s original “no” to be the final defining word for our species.
Jesus is God’s “yes” that meets humanity’s “no”.

As we make a real choice to believe that “yes,” and to receive that “yes”, the Holy Spirit begins the process of transforming sin back into its original virtue. That process of transformation produces an identifiable and measurable result in the way we think, feel and exert our will. That process of transformation is deeply and profoundly organic in the way it changes our attitudes and actions.

The fruit of our choice to accept God’s “yes” in Christ is: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness and self-control. As we bring forth this fruit in our lives, the Holy Spirit uses this process and experience of transformation to bring clarity to who God creates us to be. In that clarity we discern the root of all desire, even sinful distortions of desire, is the forever friendship we have with the Beloved.

Whatever we ask in the Beloved, through the Beloved and with the Beloved is in union with the perfect will of the Father and will find expression in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the way we experience our lives here and now. It is not a blank check to fulfill all desire. Neither is it a magic formula to get what we want when we want it. It is the realignment of thought, emotion and will with the pattern, plan and purpose of the Creation in the particularity of our lives.

17 These things I command you, that you love one another.
The consistent message of Moses, the prophets and the apostles is the original choice humanity made and continues to confirm in our choices to separate from Divine love and compassion. The reality of Jesus is the incarnation of that love. The Beloved left the eternal realm and entered into the realm of matter, energy, time and space. He came to seek the lost who do not wish to be found. He came as the Father’s “yes” to humanity’s “no”. He came to reunite the separated. And he continues to pour forth his love in the real presence of the blessed sacrament of Holy Communion to transform us in that love

We cannot practice steadfast holy unconditional love by will alone. We cannot practice the new way of living from the old life of separation. God’s solution to this problem is a person: Jesus Christ. As we live and move and have our being in Jesus we receive the transforming Divine Presence of the Holy Spirit to live the new life of Jesus as he embodied that life.

. The identifiable and measureable result of Divine Love in our lives is how we treat each other.