Jesus spent a lot of time talking about love, especially in the Gospel of John. His actions, healings, meetings, and miracles are aimed at showing God’s love. So, when he is not talking about love, he is acting on love and showing us love in action.
Even though we live in a culture that is supposedly based on Christian love, we do not really understand love in the way that Jesus means it for us. Love in our culture is all sweetness, warm fuzzies, being nice, and me feeling good. Love has become that warm feeling we have when we fall in love with someone and have lots of palpitations. Love is that momentary good feeling we have when we behave well, when we receive praise or congratulations, or when we do some civil good. Love has become an exchange of personal feelings. I like you when you like me.
Two cultural examples of this kind of love are St Valentine’s Day and the Lion in the Wizard of Oz. We all exchange St Valentine’s Day candies and the mini-greeting cards. At the end of the day, we count up how many little cards we have, and we feel good about ourselves. In the movie “The Wizard of Oz”, the Lion has no heart, and the Wizard gives him a big heart award. Then the Lion responds by feeling good about himself and walking around saying: “Ah shucks!” We think that good feelings for receiving a reward is love.
Jesus speaks about love in the dimension of the Cross – self-sacrifice and constant service to others. This is not just being nice (once in a while), not just doing something that makes us feel good, and not just exchanging love with those who love us. For Jesus love is serving all people at all times, even our enemies. When the Lion first met Dorothy, he lacked courage or fortitude. He lacked the dedication to love others. He was using violence, power and force to make other people love him. Basically, he was a bully. He learned how to renounce himself through love. By serving, helping, protecting, and advocating for others he learned how to love. He found the courage and fortitude to live through love. He was able to abandon his violence and self-centeredness. This is the love that Jesus announces in the Gospel, and it is that love that he shows us throughout the Gospel with his actions and his Cross.
Our family, friends, enemies, classmates, and teachers all come into our lives to help us learn how to love. Their purpose in life is not to love us – as our culture would have us believe. Their purpose in our lives is to help us to be able to love other people and abandon ourselves, our violence, and our selfishness. A true Christian is always looking for ways to love: help, serve, protect, and advocate for others – even our enemies and people not like us.
This I command you: Love one another.
Image: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=iMtzyNgIHuA