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To prepare His Disciples for His coming Ascension, Our Lord says to them, “I will be with you only a little while longer.” This departure from the earth was not to be experienced as a leave-taking upon a mission accomplished, nor worse: an abandonment, because, as Saint John describes the heavenly voice: “Behold, God’s dwelling is with the human race.”
This motif of presence-in-absence will play itself out in the Readings we will have for Mass over the next three weeks, leading us through the Feast of the Ascension, to Pentecost. And so, to promulgate, strengthen and enforce Christ’s continuing Presence in His Church, He says, “I give you a new Commandment: love one another.”
A lovely thought, certainly, but how, exactly, is this a new Commandment? After all, aren’t the Ten Commandments, in their essence, really commands to love? Yes, indeed they are. The Ten Commandments speak to us of our limited human capacity to know and love God (the first three Commandments) as well as the weakness and imperfection of our love for one another, (the other seven).
So, in giving us this “new” commandment, Our Lord qualifies the love which we must strive for with one another. He says, “As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.” What, then is the quality of love that will make our love Christlike? In another place Our Lord had said, “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” This means that God’s love for us in Christ is faithful and eternal.
In a culture which seeks and defines love as mostly impulsive and spontaneous, seeking a faithful and eternal love seems like an incredible expectation. But the Lord had also said earlier, “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” So, He who calls us to perfection of life can certainly call us to a love for one another that reflects the supernatural quality of God’s love. Herein, then, we find the meaning behind the Lord’s “new commandment”: the perfection of the human condition is love, and that perfect act of love is found on the Cross, an act of complete self-sacrifice.
Appearing to Saint Angela Merici once on a Good Friday, Christ said something to her that has become well-known in spiritual circles: “My love for you has not been a game.” While there can be a joyful and even playful dimension to love, we know that Our Lord has not just loved us for fun, He loved us to the utmost consequence. Adapting this supernatural element of self-sacrifice into our human love means that Christian love can sometimes be hard work, so we can’t merely play at it, we must work at it.
However, bringing God into the equation, especially through the Sacraments of Holy Eucharist and Reconciliation, can transform our love and bring something of the supernatural into our mere human love. There can be no true union with God unless we also love our neighbor. The obverse of this is also true. We are bound to love our neighbor insofar as our neighbor belongs to God. With God’s Grace, this love becomes less self-interested (where one might think, “What’s in it for me?”). Therefore, we love our neighbor as an act of loving God. By virtue of Our Lord’s Ascension into Heaven and His sending of the Holy Spirit, Christianity becomes really a sort of continuation of the Lord’s Incarnation.
Here is what the Trappist Monk Dom Eugene Boylan wrote about this: “Each of us is asked to give Our Lord a further chance of satisfying His love for God the Father and His love for men by living in us, and by performing in partnership with us, acts of charity — both to the Father directly in heaven and for His creatures here on earth. And Our Lord wishes also to use us as a means of letting others show their love for Him through the kind things they do for us. We should note this double aspect of Christian charity. It should be done by Christ and to His members united in Him. It will not be until we see Him face to face in heaven that we will perceive the full depth of meaning in His prayer to the Father at the Last Supper: ‘…that the love with which you have loved me, may be in them, and that I may be in them.’”
In Christian charity, then, Christ is “replaced” in the world by the members of His Church. The Saints became saints by using the opportunities we neglect. In our transformed love, though it might remain difficult to see Christ in some people, each person provides us an opportunity to serve Christ in kindness and mercy. This is the way to holiness and the means by which, as Our Lord said, “All will know that you are my disciples.”