There is a story from the early church that the author of this gospel of John lived to be an old, old man, so old that he had to be carried around from place to place, and he said very little, and when he did speak, what he did was just repeat to the Christians around him today’s gospel passage, my little children, love one another. And he repeated it so much that it frustrated people, they wanted more than that, they asked him why he just kept repeating it, and he said that if we do this one thing, it is sufficient.
It sounds simple, one commandment, but then we know with Jesus anyway, simple doesn’t always mean easy. It is easy, for example, to love people who love us, who give us joy and life. It’s wonderful that we love people like that, that’s how we learn what love is, but unfortunately, that is not the one sufficient thing he was talking about. Because we’re also supposed to love in situations where love does not come easily, loving strangers as well as friends, being present in love alongside people we have nothing in common with, people who have radically different ideas about what matters. And it involves not just loving them intellectually, but actually being present with them in a way that means we deal with them as brothers and sisters. And that, as we all know, is not always easy.
During this Easter season we hear a lot from the Acts of the Apostles, and that’s where we find that this radical equality that Jesus is pushing us towards wasn’t easy back then, either. All of a sudden, Paul and the other apostles found themselves trying to manage communities where the rich and the poor, slaves and free, were completely equal, all eating together as if they were one family, not constantly dividing themselves into subgroups who were more comfortable with one another. That didn’t always go well. And yet that’s what Jesus was trying to get across with every facet of his life, that God sees people differently from the way we see them, Jesus crossed every boundary that people erect around one another, and he asked us to be like the Good Samaritan and cross those boundaries ourselves.
The passage we heard today from John’s gospel comes right after the moment when he got down on his knees to wash the disciples’ feet, saying, if I can do this for you, then you too can be on your hands and knees now and then, doing something that you would never do otherwise just because you realize how much you yourself have been loved. We love one another because we are trying somehow to respond to how much we are loved — loved as we are, in all our imperfection. It sometimes seems impossible to love people without boundaries as Jesus did, and it is, until we realize that he is the one who continues to do it, who gives us the power to do it, whenever we allow him and ask him to be with us, whenever we realize that his presence within us, his presence in the eucharist we share, is there so that he can be the source of our love.
Sometimes we wonder about the church, not just our Catholic church but all the churches out there, we wonder why young people aren’t drawn to them the way maybe they used to be, and Jesus gives us the answer to that today, too. People will recognize genuine disciples if love is what they see when they look at a church. When they see strangers and refugees welcomed, when they see people accepted whatever their background and given a seat with all the other sinners, that is what young people or really any people, that’s what they want to see in a church, you might even say it’s all they want to see. That author of the gospel of St. John might have been right, if we get this one thing right, it’s sufficient.
I can’t tell anyone here exactly where in your life that kind of love Jesus was talking about is there for you to give.
But the thing we know about God is that he doesn’t make the opportunities for love scarce. The world is filled with people who need acceptance of the way they are, and who need to be loved for who they are. That love is the one thing we all want, and the one thing necessary to offer to someone else.