May 5 2024
Acts of the Apostles 10: 25-26, 34-35, 44-48 + Psalm 98 + 1 John 4: 7-10 + John 15: 9-17
There is something very profound being proclaimed in this Gospel today. If we really understood it, it might take our breath away at the sheer intensity of what it means for our understanding of God and of the Incarnation. You can’t really have someone as a friend that you do not know, and we don’t make friends with someone for what we can get out them. We know what that’s like, being used.
I am beginning to believe that this failure to understand and know God is the cause of the kind of secular atheism that marks the age in which we live. There is something incompatible with the idea of God as a good and loving Lord and Master and our modern age idea that we are our own masters who work out our lives, choose our values, and what rules to live by. You can’t be that kind of person and be a “slave.” So, God is incompatible with that idea of liberty.
When Jesus says today “I shall not call you servants anymore”, it is God speaking through his Son who is not the same as God. Jesus is the Word Made Flesh. He is “God from God” as we say in the Creed. If we keep thinking that Jesus is the same as God, then forget about the Holy Trinity.
The mission of Jesus Christ, the very wish of the Father was to restore what is lost through sin, intimate friendship with the Father. Remember how in Book of Genesis the writer describes the relationship between God and those first humans. It was friendship. They walked in the garden together. They talked. They listened. Those first humans before they sinned understood God because they knew they were made in God’s image, and they knew what that was because they were friends. God wanted that restored, and salvation history began.
God’s desire was never to makes us slaves, not even to make us happy, comfortable servants looked after by a kind master who provided anything needed. The aim of the Incarnation was to make us friends, to take us into divine friendship. Think how awesome that is! Yet to really get it, we have to clear about what friendship is.
In friendship there is a very unique kind of love that is not based upon need. Friendship love reaches out to another just for the sake of that other, not for any satisfaction, need, or pleasure. This is the kind of love that unites the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It has been going on for all eternity because, God is friendship, perfect friendship.
God does not need human beings to be God’s friends, but God chooses to love us with that true and real kind of friendship. God does not get something out of this relationship, and we ought not accept it with the expectation that we are going to get something either. If we say we love God for what we can get out of God, it isn’t love or friendship. At the same time to stop loving God because we didn’t get something is proof positive that there was no friendship love to begin with. We love God because God is God. God loves us because of who we are, not because of what we have done. That is why God keeps on loving us even when we are less than what God has created us to be.
There is a wonderful kind of high nobility in being a friend, and never more so for us than being a friend of God. Being reminded of that today with this Gospel gives us every reason to rise up with joyful and grateful hearts knowing every minute of every day that we are loved just as we are and that we were loved even before we were born.