The Sixth Sunday of Easter

John 15: 9-17

No one has greater love than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

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 may 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.

Discussion Questions:

1. Remain in my love. Do you believe that love continues to unite people even after death? Do you have any personal experience that affirms such a belief? Explain
2. Jesus “commands us” to love one another as He has loved us. How do you experience God’s love for you?
3. How do you connect your experience of God’s love, to the act of loving others? Where does this happen for you easily, and where is it most challenging?
4. Do you feel that you have to earn God’s love? How do today’s readings help you understand that you cannot / do not have to do this?
5. How does it feel for you to think of Jesus as serving you, as your friend and brother? Is this a consoling or an uncomfortable orientation for you? Why?

Biblical Context

John 15:9-17
Mary M. McGlone CSJ

Today’s Gospel gives us a seat at the Last Supper table where Jesus is making his farewell address. This was his moment to tell his disciples how important their relationship with him had been and would become. As was his habit, Jesus circled the same themes in various ways, finding enough metaphors and images for everyone to get the point.

This reading begins with an astounding statement: “As the Father loves me, so I love you.” That’s another way of saying, “I love you as an integral, intimate part of my own identity. I could not be who I am without you.”

Then came the invitation: “Remain in my love.” The word “remain” can also be translated as “abide” or “live.” It expresses Jesus’ request that we return the love he is giving. To abide in his love implies a double sense of both receiving life from him and dwelling in him. Far more than any sort of companionship, this is Jesus’ request and invitation that disciples, among whom most of us hope to number ourselves, cultivate a relationship with him that makes them ever more conscious that he is the source of their life. Abiding in him allows his approach to life, his values, his loves and desires to take root in us. He is inviting us to relate to him in the same way as he relates to the Father.

The concrete example he gives of this is the request that we keep his commandments just as he keeps the Father’s. When we look at his life, we do not find him concentrating on rules but living out of the heart of his relationship with God. For Jesus to keep God’s commands was not a question of law but of sharing the Father’s deepest desires and acting on them in his own life. That relationship with the Father was not only his source of life, but also, as he says here, his joy — the joy he wanted to share with his disciples as well. In that same vein, he tells us that he doesn’t look to us to be his servants, but his friends — people who share his own heart’s desires.

Then comes the apostolic commission. Unlike what we hear in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus does not give disciples a mission job description. There’s no command to preach, baptize or heal. All Jesus tells us to do is bear the fruit that springs from love. That, of course, is a job description without limits. But he also gives us an unlimited promise of support, assuring us that when we ask the Father anything in his name, in other words, whenever we desire to unite ourselves more deeply to him and his purpose, the Father will grant our petition.

In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus left with the promise that he would always be with us. Here he promises not just to be with, but that his life can flourish in us.

The Gift of True Friendship

Reflection
 Patricia Datchuck Sánchez

In the course of human history, there have been many who have attempted a proper definition of a friend. For Aristotle, a friend was a “single soul, dwelling in two bodies.” Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that “a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.” In describing the mutuality enjoyed by friends, Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote, “Experience teaches us that love does not consist of two people looking at each other, but of looking together in the same direction.” Some anonymous writers have defined a friend as “one who multiplies joys and divides grief”… or as “one who comes in when the whole world has gone out.” Within our own Judeo-Christian tradition, Jesus’ ben Sirach offered the following: “A faithful friend is a sure whelter, whoever finds one has found a rare treasure. A faithful friend is the elixir of life and those who fear the Lord will find one” (Ecclesiasticus 6:14, 15) (J.B. trans).

Closer to our own time, the symbiosis which is true friendship was remarkably enunciated in the experience of the great German artist Albreht Durer (1471-1528). When Durer left home to study art, he became friends with a young man of similar desires. The two became roommates, but both being poor, they were not able to make a living and study at the same time. As it happened, the friend suggested that Durer should study while he worked to support them both. Reluctantly, Durer agreed and when at long last his paintings began to sell, the friend was able to return to his art. Sadly, the hard work had stiffened and gnarled his fingers and he could no longer paint with skill. Some say it was these aged and worn hands of his friend that inspired one of Durer’s best known paintings, “The Praying Hands.” This being so, then those hands revealed the quality of friendship to which Jesus calls his disciples. Like the friend who sacrificed himself so that Durer could develop and thrive, Jesus showed the depths of his love by laying down his life so that we, his friends, might live. There is no greater love than this (John 15:13).
As the Johannine evangelist points out, the relationship of the disciples to Jesus had progressed from curious inquiry (John 1:38: “Where do you live?”) to authentic friendship.

However, that progress was not without difficulty. At times Jesus shocked his followers (John 4:27), frightened them (John 6:19), confused (John 6:5), and appalled them (John 6:60-66). But to those who remained faithful, he became the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6).

Of those whom he chooses to be his friends, Jesus expects fidelity to the commandments (John 15:10), the fruitfulness of responsible service (v. 16), and a mutual symbiotic love for one another in his name (vv. 12, 17). If these seem to be daunting challenges, readers of John need only remember the literary context of today’s gospel. Part of the discourse following the proclamation, “I am the vine, you are the branches” (John 15:5), these challenges can be met by believers who draw their strength from Jesus, the true vine. As branches united to the one vine, believers become capable of keeping the commandments, bearing fruit in responsible service and living in symbiosis, loving one another as Jesus has loved and continues to love them.

While most believers may not be required to follow Jesus in his ultimate act of love, viz., the laying down of his life, there are numerous large and small daily opportunities for emulating the selflessness which motivated his sacrifice. To think in terms of you rather than I. . . to willingly and joyfully place the needs of others ahead of our own. . . to allow another’s opinion to prevail . . . to be the first to apologize regardless of who was wrong. . . to choose the car with fewer accessories to be able to donate more to the homeless. . . to volunteer the time it would take to play eighteen holes of golf to work in a shelter or soup kitchen. . . these are some ways to “lay down one’s life” and to show ourselves as true friends of Jesus.

Reflection from, The Word We Celebrate, Patricia Datchuck Sánchez