A Reflection for Friday of the Fifth Week of Easter
Find today’s readings here.
“This I command you: Love one another.” What could be simpler?
It can seem like “Love one another” should be something to which everyone can give agreement, a point of consensus that can settle disputes and resolve differences over doctrine or interpretation. I sometimes think of this—borrowing from the Beatles—as the “all we need is love” approach.
Yet in practice it is never so simple. Because in order for it to be so simple, then the continued reality of disagreement and division would have to be explained by people rejecting love, as if we all had a common understanding of what “love one another” means but only some of us were willing to live by that understanding.
I think there are two ways in which “love one another” is more challenging than the Beatles-style approach.
One is that we may have different interpretations of how love is to be understood and practiced, or, in situations of competing goods, of how love is to be prioritized. (This is the kind of disagreement that I take to be behind the recent arguments over the ordo amoris and immigration policy.)
But the second, and I think much deeper challenge of “Love one another” is that it asks for a more profound and self-giving love than we may be ready to give. We should not miss the fact that Jesus’ first iteration of this new commandment is “love one another as I have loved you,” and explains that no one has greater love than “to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Jesus gives this commandment during the Last Supper, the night before his love for his disciples takes him to the Cross.
As simple as “Love one another” may sound—as simple as it may be—it is as costly as the Cross. That is also why, here in the Easter Season, it is filled with the hope of the Resurrection.
