Today’s readings: Acts 10, 25-26.34-35.44-48; 1 John 4, 7-10; John 15, 9-17

As we liturgically approach the other face of the resurrection of Jesus which is Pentecost, the Scripture texts today dwell on the legacy of Jesus that the Spirit is sent to confirm. It is the central theme of love. Not our love, genuine as it can be, but God’s love for us. St John writes: “God sent into the world his only son so that we could have life through him; this is the love I mean: not our love for God, but God’s love for us.”

There is an echo of this in the Dialogue of St Catherine of Siena where she writes that in Christian life, what is mostly important is not what we do to love God but that we discover His love for us. Often we make God’s love depend on whether we deserve it or not and we also distinguish between those whom we judge as deserving of His love and those not.

It took Peter himself in Acts some time to realise that “God does not have favourites” and “that the gift of the Holy Spirit should be poured out on the pagans too”. We have weighed down the only commandment of love which Jesus gave us with complex moralisms and sophisticated legalities making Christian life look too complicated.

In the way we handle our faith, everything seems to depend on our good will, our commitment, our choices, our struggles to be good and show God that we love Him. This is true only to some extent but it seems to miss something important which St John today highlights in his gospel and first letter.

John’s gospel distinguishes between ‘servants’ and ‘friends’. “A servant does not know his master’s business,” writes John. But Jesus says: “I call you friends, because I have made known to you everything I have learnt from my Father”. Throughout the long history of faith, we have always depicted God as an unknowable and unreachable mystery, and religion has many a time been depicted as an uphill struggle almost in total darkness.

Today’s liturgy is a celebration of God’s unconditional love for us. It is such good news that God loves us first and that His love does not depend on whether we deserve it or not. The good news for us is that God’s love comes our way, reaches out to us whoever we are and wherever we are. It fills our voids and makes our joy complete.

God’s love is gratuitous, without presupposing our merits. In the Gospel we have clear instances of such love as depicted in a number of parables. Jesus today says “Remain in my love” because it is so easy for us to go astray. In his book On Religion, philosopher John Caputo remarks that the opposite of a religious person is a loveless person because, as we read from John’s letter, “whoever does not love does not know God”.

“Remain in my love” is a command to align our loves and longings with His. He is appealing to the passionate regions of the heart because, as author James K.A. Smith writes in his book You Are What You Love, it is our desires that define who we are. Hence Augustine’s warning: “Love, but be careful what you love”.

Since our hearts are made to find their end in God, we will experience anxiety and restlessness when we try to love substitutes. Augustine was clear on this and perhaps this is what, after long struggles with himself, led him to give the advice: “Love and do what you will”.

Love, which brightens the dark patches we experience in believing, is not just a matter of feeling.

The one who loves is not a servant, but a friend. Love unblocks the mind even in the face of the most complex riddles of existence. Augustine again – if love is the measure, the only measure of love is love without measure. That is how God loves us.