Hans Urs von Balthasar
“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I have said these things to you that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” (John 15:9-11)
This passage from the farewell discourse contains such amazing and important words of the Lord to the disciples that we should not only admire them but also try to accept them as grace and a challenge, and arrange our lives accordingly.
Is it not – and this is the first point that captures our attention – strange that there can be talk of the highest divine love and of keeping commandments at the same time? For us humans, this would not be so strange, as we are egotistical by nature, and therefore the required love is felt as a law and a commandment imposed on us. But Christ, who knows no sin, calls himself someone who is subject to the Father’s commandments. However, when we consider what kind of love for sinners is truly demanded of him: to advocate even for those who reject him, ridicule him, want to remove him at all costs, and do so in the most disgraceful ways, then it becomes clear to us that this love could indeed become the toughest, most relentless demand for him, precisely for him who loved us as his friends. And when he knows that the Father loves him because he lives in obedience to His commandments and ordinances, this obedience to the Father leads him to the point where, for the hardness of the commandments, he even loses the consciousness and feeling of the Father's love: “My God, why have you forsaken me?” The incarnate divine love is forsaken by eternal love precisely because it maintains the commandment of love to the utmost.
Why? Surely not only to teach us, even though the way of the cross is the most eloquent teaching that Jesus has given us. But rather because, in God's plan with the world, it could not have been otherwise than that He himself had to experience and suffer all the unlove and enmity of the world toward God, and reconcile and destroy suffering to grant human freedom its final entitlement. This remains profoundly mysterious even for the believing Christian, and yet one cannot seek the solution to the mystery of why freedom and evil exist in the world elsewhere. God's love is the most commensurate with God's essence, but when it collides with the world's unlove, it becomes a hard commandment. The Song of Songs expresses this in its own way: “For love is strong as death, jealousy is fierce as the grave” (Song of Solomon 8:6). Is there anything strange about us, whom Christ here calls his friends, feeling sometimes the demand, which is indeed pure grace, like a hard commandment? Jesus says: “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” A person is internally liberated, is brought back to themselves, and calmed in their restlessness when they decide to love selflessly, instead of eternally circling around themselves: every good psychiatrist knows this. We find ourselves only when we find love; the commandment of love is the shortest path to freedom, yes, it is freedom itself. Nevertheless, there is a point where this path of freedom leads through darkness and through the hardest obstacles. Namely when the other person is unsympathetic to us, unpleasant, or even worse – when they act toward us as an enemy. We know very well: the commandment of love for enemies is the ultimate touchstone for every Christian. God loved us in Christ when we were still his enemies and died for us. Thus, God does not consider anyone as his enemy. So, regarding the Christian, there are no enemies. The other may consider themselves my enemy and act like one, but for me, he is a brother loved by God, and therefore I must love him in Christ. I could not come before God’s eyes if I harbored enmity in my heart toward anyone. Jesus is completely uncompromising at this point because here we stand at the very center of Christian practice: “When you bring your gift to the altar” – that is, when you go to church, to celebrate the Eucharist, or simply approach prayer – “and there you remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift” (Matthew 5:23).
This must be taken literally. Perhaps I cannot be reconciled with the brother who is hostile to me, but one thing I can always do: reconcile with him in my heart, regard him as a brother in Christ, and pray for him on the way to church. And likewise, I can always do something else, even though Christians often carelessly neglect this and forget it: I can and must apologize when I have hurt someone with words or deeds. This is part of normal Christian politeness. But so many Christians hardly ever say the sentence “I am sorry”; and perhaps even less often when the offended person is closer to them – be it a partner in marriage or one of the parents, children, friends, subordinates, or superiors. It requires a bit of self-overcoming, but how worthwhile it is! This prevents alienation, oil is poured into the gears of humanity instead of sand, and we incredibly ease the other’s further commandment of love: the commandment to forgive. How often should one forgive? – asks Peter. Seventy-seven times, Jesus replies. It is easy to forgive someone who asks for forgiveness. Forgiving someone who does not see the need to ask for forgiveness can be very difficult. Perhaps the whole Church would look different if we took this basic command of the Lord literally as it is meant. From countless, small acts of daily mutual forgiveness of sins, as required by the Our Father, an internally liberated, joyful community full of light would arise, which could then give the world a credible testimony. The individual who asks for forgiveness and their neighbor who forgives them are in this encounter true friends of the Lord not only because He loves them, but because they keep His commandments and remain in His love. And only then do they experience that Jesus' joy is in them and that their own joy has been made complete. Both do not experience satisfaction over themselves in this truly Christian encounter, joy from their ability to overcome themselves, but rather – being carried by grace and God's commandment – they have transcended their own human limits and share in a completely different joy. It is the joy of Christ – “my joy in you” – and it is a foretaste of heaven. From such acts and experiences, a credible Church is built.
We live in the time after Pentecost, in which the Spirit of Jesus Christ and the Spirit of God the Father are already working in the Church, in us. Therefore, we cannot say that we do not know who this Spirit is and what He asks of us. It would therefore be necessary to finally start taking seriously what the Lord said in the farewell discourse.
Big feelings do not achieve much here, but small daily tasks in the immediate vicinity do. “Embracing millions” – is of no use for building God's kingdom on earth. In contrast, a lot can benefit from the spiritual embrace of a single unloved person in my vicinity, for whose alienation and isolation I might have some complicity. In such small, minor work, the Holy Spirit builds God’s kingdom on earth, unobtrusively, until suddenly something spiritually powerful appears here that extraordinarily helps to overcome the great earthly problems of humanity. This quiet building is the true Pentecostal movement. Paul already said that speaking in tongues is certainly good – if it comes to that, he can do all of it as well – but the Church is not built by this, but only by love, of which Paul says that it is patient, kind, does not envy, does not seek its own, is not easily angered, and keeps no record of wrongs, but rather bears all things. In other words: it does not calculate what others have done to it, not only forgives wrongs, but also forgets them, does not have a big memory that accumulates how much wrong has been done to it, but allows them to sink into God's forgiveness, removing them from the world as if they had never happened. For that is how God loves. In heaven, we will one day love each other in this way, for all mutual offenses will have been definitively forgotten. And so the Holy Spirit gives us the strength to love here on earth, for otherwise we cannot build God's kingdom on earth. It would be completely useless to pray: “Your will be done, your kingdom come,” if we do not take seriously the words: “Forgive us our sins, as we also forgive those who trespass against us.”
(Sermon on Swiss radio, May 20, 1979. Shortened.
Taken from Christliche Innerlichkeit 15/3 and 15/4, 1980.
Translated by Sister Petra of the Risen, OCD.)
