“Love One Another as I Have Loved You”
(Jn 15:12)
Dear Sisters
and Brothers in Christ,
When we
listen to Christ telling us to love one another as He has loved us, we are
invited to come and learn how to love in a true, authentic way in the school of
Christian Love—or the Course of Charity.
Charity, or
Christian love, consists of the love of God as its origin and foundation. Saint John teaches that God is love and love
comes from God. God, out of His great
and unconditional love, made us in His image, giving us a heart that loves Him
and our neighbor. It is this same heart
that knows how to appreciate the love of God and that of our friends.
This is the
first lesson that love is a gift from God alone, and that human being alone is
capable of loving and of being loved.
In fact,
animals have survival instinct that helps them preserving their offspring but
never do their instinctive activities have anything in common with the love
exclusively granted by God the Creator to a human person. Love, therefore, is a human act, involving both
body and soul, emotion and mind, rights and responsibilities. In love, man finds the highest degree of expressions
for his dignity by getting out of the prison of selfishness, overcoming all
forms of discrimination, separation and division, and finally reaching the transcendent
and supreme goodness of God.
Unfortunately
human love because of sin has turned selfish, abusive, violent, materialistic,
more instinctive than human, more bodily than spiritual. Human love, for this reason, needs being
saved by the love of God which we can see, hear, and experience in Christ Jesus
His Son.
It is Christ
Who teaches us how to love one another as He has loved us, saying that “no one
has greater love than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Not only did Christ teach us the lesson of
Christian love, he also put what he said into action. He died crucified on the cross to save our
lives from sin and death. By so doing,
Christ has saved human love, too.
This is the
second lesson that true and authentic love needs the love of God to be its
heart, life and soul. Human love without
the love of God is lifeless and is reduced to many forms of abuse, such as mere
flesh pleasure, trade of money and power, and the like. On the other hand, human love also needs the
love of neighbor as its shape, its form.
Saint John teaches that who says that he loves God but hates his brother
is just a liar. The way we love our
neighbor shows how much we love God.
This is how
Christian love works in our everyday life: we love God because God has loved us
in Christ Who laid down His life to save our lives, and as the result of this,
we love one another because God loved us first.
Fr. Francis Nguyen, O.P.
