His Commands are Light and Truth

...carry one another's burdens, and so you will fulfill the whole law of Christ (Gal. 6:2).

Whoever loves his brother remains in the light, and there is nothing in him to cause a fall

(I Jn. 2:10).

My command is this: love one another as I have loved you (Jn. 15:12).

Remain in me, and I will remain in you (Jn. 15:4).

Today I must quote at length from Madeleine Delbrel's book We, the Ordinary People of the Streets:

The Gospel's secret does not open itself to curiosity; it is not an intellectual initiation. 

 Rather, the Gospel's secret is essentially a life-giving mystery.

The light of the Gospel does not remain an extrinsic illumination--

rather, it is a fire that demands entry into us so that it may ravage and transform us.

The Gospel is not for minds seeking ideas, but for disciples who wish to obey.

It is not given to us to meet the Gospel's simple and ruthless commands with a "perhaps" or an "almost." No, the only alternatives are the "yes, yes" that opens us to life, or the "no, no" that locks us in death.

We should not thus be surprised at the sad, interminable journeys, the deep upheaveals that each of these words initiates within us.  We should not try to hold back this sort of free-fall of the word into our depths.  We need the passive courage that allows it to act within us---Let it be done to me according to your Word. [end of quote]

Here's the issue:  In each one of us there is a limit to our ability to carry out the command of Jesus.  We perhaps can love those who love us, or those who make it easy to love them---but what about those who oppose us, who hate us, or who just rub us the wrong way on a daily basis.  What does it mean to love them as Christ has loved us?  Jesus Himself gave us the answer when He pointed us to the Father, who lets his rain fall on the just and the unjust, who does not withhold good things from those who hate Him.

Our feelings have nothing to do with how we act toward those who hate and dismiss us.  The reason I included the last Scripture from John is that our goal is to remain in Jesus and to allow Him to remain in us in our encounters with all others.  We need to stand back, as it were, and to watch Jesus in us encounter our "enemies," or those with whom we have no natural sympathy---Jesus, who came to the end of His own natural inclinations during the 40 days He spent in the desert; Jesus, who allowed Himself to be abused by man and who prayed for them to the Father because they knew not what they did to Him or to themselves.

Last week, I quoted Paul in Galatians saying that those who are in Christ Jesus have crucified their own evil passions and desires.  Knowing the rest of Paul's theology, I know that he would have meant not that we have in ourselves had the strength to "crucify" ourselves, but that we would have allowed Jesus to crucify the natural man in us who constantly wars against the Spirit of God:  It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me to the glory of God.

We cannot really "love one another as Christ has loved us."  All we can do is to allow Him in us to love our enemies and to do good to those who persecute us.  And He will, and He does!  We just need to ask Him to do what we cannot do for ourselves, and we must be willing to allow Him to do it.  I had a friend who used to say, "I am willing to be made willing," because she recognized at times that she was not willing at the moment to allow Christ to live in a certain situation---she knew there was still work in her own soul to be done to get to that point.

His commands are Light and Truth, but we still walk in the dark until He lives entirely in us!