This morning’s Gospel reading is John 15:9–17:
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 might 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.”
What is the nature of love? And why does Jesus tell His disciples to “remain” in His love? How do we know what love is in this Gospel passage?
We could queue up the obligatory Foreigner ballad, but that puts us up against a limitation in English that we’ve discussed in the past. The word love in our language (and perhaps many others) has become incredibly elastic, covering a wide range of emotional statuses. We love pizza — some of us a little too much! — and we also love our spouses. We love the latest Marvel or Star Wars film, and we also love our children. We love it when we get a question right in a trivia contest, and we also love our friend when he or she is going through any difficulties.
In our language, all of these usages are correct, and that dilutes the term when it matters most. Clearly that matters most here, where Jesus speaks directly about salvation rather than through parables. Jesus uses the word love nine times in nine verses in this reading from John’s Gospel. This is not allegorical but literal, and so we need to know the literal meaning of the word He chose.
C.S. Lewis addresses this in his book The Four Loves. Using Greek as the basis of distinction, Lewis identifies four different versions of ‘love,’ in an ascending order of intensity:
- Storge – empathy, also a kind of fondness through familiarity and/or proximity
- Philia – True friendship, a higher level of bonding than Storge
- Eros – Romantic love, driven by both physical and spiritual longing
- Agape – Unconditional and self-sacrificing love (in Latin, caritas)
The first three, Lewis writes, are the “natural loves.” The fourth, agape, is “God” love, a divine form of love to which the other three must be subordinated. The natural loves are good to a point, but all of them can be curdled into self-love and self-aggrandizement that transforms us into narcissistic and/or manipulative sinners. Only through agape can we be redeemed, because that requires us to empty out the self to serve others.
Agape is the love within the Trinity, and the love that God wants to share with each of us. By definition, it is unchanging and unending; God offers it freely to us unconditionally while allowing us to choose whether to receive it. The natural loves can sometimes feel like agape, but they rely mainly on our own feelings and therefore are changeable, conditional, and often downright fickle. Agape is a constant, an eternal love that remains no matter what we do or how we feel — because for our hearts to feel agape, we must have already dispensed with the self as the center of our consideration.
And here we get to the crux of Jesus’ Gospel today. Many readers already know these distinctions between “loves,” but today’s reading spells it out clearly. Jesus tells His disciples to adopt this agape love for one another, as an action that cuts against the natural inclination of self-consciousness. Jesus specifies that level of divine love by reminding them that they have to love one another to the point of offering their lives for their benefit — a lesson He would teach them shortly afterward in practice.
But when it comes to the love of the Father and of Jesus, He tells them to “remain in my love.” Why? Jesus is teaching them that the Father’s love is constant, unchanging, and unending.
Once again, the parable of the prodigal son is useful. The NIV title to this parable in Luke 15 is actually “The Parable of the Lost Son,” which connects us more directly to this lesson. The younger son of the father demands half of the wealth as though his father has already died. The father gives it to him, and the younger son dissipates it and falls into ruin. The father allowed his son to make the choice to leave his love, but as we see on the son’s return, the love never stopped. The son had to face the consequences of his choices, but when he returned to his father and his father’s love, the son was restored to his standing. In contrast, the elder brother’s love is clearly conditional and not agape at all.
The son was lost, but came back to his father’s love. Jesus offered this parable for many different lessons, but one of those was to warn against leaving the Father at all. He urges us to remain in His love rather than ruin ourselves by the warping of reliance on the “natural loves,” which led the prodigal son into dissipation and sin. But when we do rebel and sin, the Father’s love is a constant to which we can return, humbled and repentant.
God does not withhold His love because we sin; it does not turn off before confession, to use a handy analogy, and then come back after it. We leave the Father’s love by our own choice, not the other way around, and lose ourselves in sin. We can choose to return to Him just the way the prodigal son did in Jesus’ parable. And when we do, Jesus has already paid the price for our sinfulness, so all we need to do is claim Him as our Lord to remain in His love.
Human love is inconstant. Divine love is eternal and all-embracing. You gotta love that.
Previous reflections on these readings:
The front page image is “The Return of the Prodigal Son” by Petr Brandl, c.18th century. On display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Via Wikimedia Commons.
“Sunday Reflection” is a regular feature, looking at the specific readings used in today’s Mass in Catholic parishes around the world. The reflection represents only my own point of view, intended to help prepare myself for the Lord’s day and perhaps spark a meaningful discussion. Previous Sunday Reflections from the main page can be found here.