A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. Our lord said to his disciples, this is my commandment. Love one another as I have loved you. There is no greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.
I no longer speak of you as slaves, for a slave doesn't know what his master is about. Instead, I call you friends since I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my father. It was not you who chose me. It was I who chose you to go forth and to bear fruit. Your fruit must endure so that everything you ask the father in my name, he will give it to you.
The command I give you is this, that you love one another. And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise to you, lord Jesus Christ. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen.
Well, here once again, we have a very explicit, perfectly clear statement of our blessed Lord about the commandment of love. And God doesn't appear at all. How about that? Notice. This is my commandment, Christ says.
Love one another as I have loved you. Here's, as I say, another instance where it's so convenient, so easy, so attractive to take a sentence, or even more than a sentence, out of context. Now what is context? Generally we mean the sentences or the words or what have you which came before or after the particular quotation. But context can mean more than that.
It can be much bigger than that. For example, the first thing when you're reading anything is to ask who wrote it. Why did he write it? When did he write it? Where did he write it?
And above all, why did he write it? And who it is who wrote it? Get the author. Do you have everything he said? Is it complete?
Does it have integrity? Or have things been left out? Has it been bolderized? That's the best kind, you know, to forget to put in those little dots. You can make anything.
Imagine what you can do with a sentence by just leaving out the little word n o t, not. That changes a sentence quite a little bit. Now here today our blessed Lord said, this is my commandment that you love one another. Does that differ from John Stuart Mill and his utilitarianism or his altruism as I mentioned yesterday morning? And the answer is if this is all there was to it, it wouldn't differ at all.
But the truth is, this is not the whole story. This is not the whole story at all. Today our blessed Lord is holding up a standard of love. He's talking about how you should love your neighbor. And he's saying you should love your neighbor as I have loved you.
Now, in other words, he's not saying anything about anything else. He's not telling you how you should love your cats and your dogs and your slaves or your enemies or God. He's simply saying, what is the standard of love that you should have for your neighbor? It's all he's talking about. In this in this particular sentence, when people talk about the great commandment, this is the way they referred to it, you know.
And when I say that, it sounds like I'm sarcastic, but I don't mean to be. These are good, solid, sincere people who would pride themselves probably at best on being called agnostics. They admit that Christ, you know, was a very good man. He he gave us a lot of good stuff, you know. And our lives would be much better off if we lived according to his great commandment.
What's his great commandment? Oh, they'll say, well, you know what it is. And I say, what is it? And they'll say, well, you know the commandment of love. Love your neighbor as you love yourself.
And then they go on to point out how how that you can find that in in in very in in ancient non Christian authors. I know that. They don't have to tell me that. But that's not Christ's commandment of love. Christ said the first commandment.
You must love God almighty with your whole heart, with your whole soul, and with all your whole mind, and with everything you are. That's the first commandment. Christ said that. So God comes first. I just read the I just read the a summary or an well, yeah, it was a summary of a so called retreat that was given last week at a hotel in another state, but not a Catholic retreat at all.
You can go through that whole summary, and only once does the word God appear in it. Only once. It's all about me. It's rather some primitive and elementary psychology made very practical, how I can adjust better to life and to life situations. Yet it was supposed to be a religious retreat, that's that's the thing it was supposed to be.
Now, again, I'm not saying I'm merely saying this as the way people operate today. You can call it what you want, secular humanism or anything you want, but this is a level on which a lot of good people are living without God or without an explicit awareness of God's existence and an explicit awareness of their obligations and responsibilities, not first to themselves, not first to their neighbor, but first to God almighty. In a nutshell, He comes first, and Christ said so. Christ didn't tell me I that the principle that the primary principle of love is to love neighbor. He never said that.
He never said that the primary and exclusive principle of love is to love your neighbor as you love yourself. I mean that he he never said that exclusively and meaning it just that way. Because the first thing we have to do is recognize gods, the almighty, the unspeakable, the inexpressible, the indescribable god. Call I don't care what name you give that, the absolute, the first cause, name it, that's incidental. We're talking about a reality which is infinite, eternal, use all these adjectives you want.
All of them are negative or superlatives, but they don't penetrate the reality of the first cause. They don't penetrate the reality of the absolute. They don't give us a a human conception of God Almighty. Never. Now this is as I've said many times, it's not easy to keep God first in our lives, even when we want to do it.
Because there's so because God's far off. He's he's an abstraction. It's only when you come to Jesus Christ that you have a man, a human being, in the concrete reality of life. You can see him, feel him, touch him, smell him, hear him. He was one of us.
God become man. The perfect human conception of God in Jesus Christ. That you can do. And you can't make any mistake because that son of Mary is truly God, one person. One person.
One person. Two natures. So the first commandment involves God. And the second commandment our Lord said, love your neighbor as you love yourself. So the second person you have to love is yourself, not your neighbor because you the love of self is a standard of loving neighbor.
And there you have the three, God, self, neighbor, and you have to hold them all together. But as I've said many times, don't get nauseated with my repetition. As Lewis, CS Lewis says, if you're if in the bicycle wheel, if the spokes are lined up with the hub, god, they'll be lined up with one another with my neighbor. But I've got my to have myself first lined up with god. In the name of the father, and the son, and holy spirit.
Amen.