Do You Want To?

There is a story told about the Apostle John, the one who wrote: “God is Love.” In the evening of his long life, he would sit for hours with his younger disci- ples gathered at his feet. One day, one of his disciples complained: “John, you always talk about love, God’s love for us, and our love for one another. Why don’t you tell us about something else besides love?” The beloved disciple who once, as a youth, laid his head over the Lord’s heart is said to have replied: “Because there is nothing else, just love … love … love.” Love is the only way to our true human destiny — and to the foot of the Cross — and to the altar of God, who is Love. At the end of John 13 and the beginning of John 14 you can read a portion of Jesus’ “Farewell Discourses.” It begins with a call for obedience and ends with the teaching that to Love God is to be obedient to His word. Jesus already has made it clear to the disciples that he is about to leave them. He says: “My little children I shall not be with you much longer. Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God still, and trust in me…i am going now to prepare a place for you, and after I have gone and prepared you a place, I shall return to take you with me; so that where I am you may be too.” Having said that, Jesus now speaks to the disciples: “If anyone loves me he will keep my Word, and my Father will love him, and we shall come to Him and make our home with Him.

If anyone loves me he will keep my Word.” Jesus does not ask us to obey Him out of obligation, or out of fear, or out of a desire to get something from him. Instead, it’s the other way around. He wants us to obey out of love for him. We don’t follow Jesus because we must. In truth, we don’t have to. We follow him because we want to. We follow him because we love him. We follow him because we want to be with him. We follow him because we want to make our home with him. We follow him because we revere him. Obedience to God’s Will — keeping Christ’s Word — opens the whole secret of the “good life” for you. Jesus is telling us in the Gospels, over and over again, that obedience to God’s Will — doing what the Lord teaches us to do — is the only way to achieve genuine wholeness of life, genuine pleasure, genuine happiness, genuine joy, genuine peace of mind and heart and soul. We say these things ,but do we believe them enough to act accordingly? Or do we keep frantically pushing and shoving and trying to have our way? There is no substitute for plain, everyday, down-to-earth obedience to the Lord. “Those who do not love me do not keep My words,” Jesus says to the disciples in today’s Lesson. And, within hours, on the cross, he would give the ultimate demonstration of the meaning of his words: “Love one another as I have loved you.”