Fifth Sunday of Easter
Year C
John 13:31-33a,34-35

The Unconditional Condition!
 

Upon Reflection:  “As” is a sneaky little word, especially when it comes to scripture translations.  When Jesus says in today’s Gospel:  “Love one another as I have loved you,” we tend to hear that in English as “Jesus loved us, so we too should love.”  That’s all well and good, but it is very possible to lose the weight of the words. Make no mistake, John describes Jesus as putting a condition on the way we believers are to love one another.  The condition is that we love one another in the same way AS Jesus loved us.  That kind of unconditional love for each other is supposed to be the sign of the new covenant.  But let’s be honest:  do we really love one another in the same unconditional way that Jesus loved?  Is the way in which we love really a sign that the covenant between God and us is now sealed?  Just think of your own family for example.  I am willing to bet that there is at least one person in your family (if not you) who is holding a grudge against another family member.  And that grudge is often completely justified, because as we know, it tends to be our family members who not only love us the most but can also hurt us the most - sometimes in very cruel and harsh ways.  Now, if we cannot forgive our own family members without condition, how could we possibly follow Jesus’ command to love the universal family?  The point is that the Gospel is always more challenging, always more demanding, and consequently always more life-giving than we tend to hear it.  If we hear today’s Gospel as just a nice little warm fuzzy message, chances are that we haven’t really HEARD today’s Gospel.


-Fred T. Mercadante
Campus Minister