6th Sunday of Easter, B May 5, 2024
Fr. Alexander Albert St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette
I’m not much of a sports fan. I rarely watch any games. I don’t follow sports news. Maybe the 4th quarter of a Saints game, but only if they’re in the playoffs. If I’ve got nothing going on and some friends invite me to watch the Superbowl, I’ll go and enjoy myself.
Baseball, however? I’ve never been a fan. It’s probably that I’m too easily distracted and too impatient, but I just can’t watch it. Yet, for some reason in 2017, I found myself caring about the Houston Astros. I still didn’t watch the games, but I listened with interest when people talked about it. I followed the news of the world series. When they won, I found myself happy for the team. Why?
Because I have friends who were really excited about it. I may not love baseball, but my friends do. And because of our friendship, I felt their love in my heart and mind. This is part of the nature of friendship: that we care not just for them, but for what they care about.
And this is what Jesus is getting at when he says “I have called you friends” to the Apostles and, if we’re willing, to us. It isn’t just that he’s taught us the full truth and died for us. No, it’s that, by his grace, his love goes out from his heart through our hearts.
This is also the key to Jesus’ strange saying that “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy might be complete.” Just as my friend’s excitement at the Astros win made me excited, so Jesus is sharing his excitement, his joy, his love with us so that we can have his joy and be filled up with it. Unlike vicarious sports fandom, however, this joy endures. I no longer pay attention to the Astros, but I do still find joy in what Jesus Christ loves.
So, what is it? What is Jesus’ fandom? What is his favorite thing that excites him so much that it spreads to his friends? Keeping his father’s commandments. That’s right, Jesus is super excited – and I mean supernaturally excited about… following the rules. Jesus has built up his entire ministry to this moment. At the last supper, the night before he is killed, he elevates his apostles to the status of friends so that he can eagerly share with them the sheer joy of… keeping commandments.
When someone starts off a sentence with “I want you to follow the rules so that…” how do you expect them to end the sentence? What motivation or reward do you expect them to offer? Follow the rules so that… you don’t die… don’t get in trouble… get a sticker… earn your desert. Most of the time, we see the rules as something restrictive. Good, maybe, but something to be endured for the sake of some other good thing. But that’s not what Jesus is saying. He is saying that keeping the commandment is the reward. Joy isn’t the external reward for commandment-keeping. You get the joy from the commandment itself.
The sports analogy still might help us out here. To be a sport, to exist as a game, it must have rules. Those who really, really love a sport – or in my case, people who really love certain kinds of board games see the rules as part of the joy. Still, even if you like the rules, you like them because they let you play the game. The game is the fun part.
So, Jesus’ joy in the commandments themselves seems a little crazy… unless you really get what that commandment is: love one another as I love you. That’s the rule: love. Love is not a restriction, not an obstacle; it is the very source of the joy. We bandy about the word “love” so often and so badly that its effect is almost totally lost on us. Do you realize that, until St. John wrote the letter we heard in the 2nd reading, no one had ever said the phrase “God is love?” God is perfect. God is one. God is almighty. God is truth. God is the goal. All these and more had been said about. People had spoken of love as a god with the lowercase ‘g,’ but to say definitively that God is love? That the very source of existence doesn’t just have love, doesn’t just do love, but is love? This is news far more exciting than the a World Series win.
God is love. But what is love, anyway? You know, right? “Love is to will the good of the other.” But let’s break that down. It’s not to wish for the good of the other, it is to will it, to choose it. It’s also not to accomplish the good of the other. You can will it even if you can’t actually make it happen. That tension is important. It can’t be so vague as to involve no effort or choice, but it also can’t be so aggressive that it controls the one we love.
What does this mean for God? God’s very existence is to will the good of the other. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit perpetually will the good of each other. That willing, that choice is so perfect, so complete that they are literally a single God, a single divine substance completely and perfectly given by each divine person to the other. This is why God does not need us. He is perfect love already given within himself.
Yet he does create us. When he does, he wills what is good for us. Neither a vague wish nor a forced outcome. The reason that Jesus is so excited about us obeying his commandment to love each other is that us choosing to do what is good for another person fills us with the God who is that love. God loves us more than a Trillion Astros fans could love a trillion world series wins. When we become his friend, that insanely incomprehensible love overflows in us, filling us with real joy.
The commandment to love others – including your enemies – isn’t the test to earn joy, it is the cause of joy. In our broken, darkened world, the individual choices to love do not immediately feel like the various excitement you have for a friend who finally got what they wanted, but those choices do change us.
Better yet, those choices don’t start with us brute forcing our way into doing the right thing. “In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.” I would never have cared for the Astros if my friend did not show his love for them, if I did not pay enough attention to him, if I did not first receive him as a friend. Thus the Eucharist. God knows we won’t actually choose the love-that-lets-itself-be-crucified on our own. So he quite literally inserts his love into our hearts through our stomachs. If we open our eyes to this, if we see love for what it is, if we let God love us, if we receive him worthily and without obstacles, all the other commandments snap into place as just 3, 8, 10 other ways to keep the one commandment of love and so receive his joy. His joy that we are adopted by him. His joy that we are forgiven. His joy at each new person who is saved by this gift. To be loved by him, to love what he loves, to love ourselves and others with his own love… yeah, God is a fan of that. I pray we’re good enough friends with him that his joy becomes ours.