Jesus gives us one of the strongest commandments of His in today’s Gospel. Not an idea but commandment: “love one another as I have loved you.” It sounds pretty easy. Doesn’t it? Everybody wants to be loved, and in our nature is that we seek to love others. So it should be easy to fallow that commandment.
Jesus tells us that: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friendsâ€.
Our Church, here in the United States, does not ask us to lay down our life for Christ. But, there are spots in the world that Christians are still persecuted. Here we are free, and with this freedom many times we do not follow God’s commandments, the commandments of Jesus. We break these commandments frequently and we say that think little of it because it is common.
A few weeks ago I preached on the third commandment of God and I showed you that by breaking that commandment we commit not only one serious sin but at least five, and the same is with the other nine. The key then is to focus on loving — not on what we shouldn’t do, but on loving because love excludes sin, love gives us what we need to do.
Love one another can mean that we do not gossip. But better it means to say a word of love and support to others.
Love one another means to worship on very regular basis but also to bring others into our community to worship God side-by-side.
Love one another means to support others in their sorrows and their problems.
Love one another means to lift others up in our goodness.
Love one another as God has loved us means that we do know the ten commandments of God in our heart and that we put the command of Jesus, to love, into action.
It is God who chose us, like he chose the Apostles, like He chose Cornelius. We accept God’s choice when we live Christian life full of love and prayers, and free of sin.