Rejoice in the Lord

Love is the source of Easter joy

“As the Father loves me, so I also love you. Remain in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete. This is my commandment: love one another as I love you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you” (Jn 15: 9-13).

In the Gospel reading for the Sixth Sunday of Easter (Jn 15:9-17), Jesus shares with us the secret to complete joy. It is love. Specifically, it is love made possible (and fulfilled) by keeping the Lord’s commandments. What are these commandments? To love God wholeheartedly, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.

Jesus says to each one of us: “Love one another as I love you. Remain in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love” (Jn 15:12, 10).

The key to love is self-sacrifice, surrendering my will to the will of God. That’s why Jesus tells us, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (Jn 15:13). The ultimate form of sacrificial love is to surrender our very lives for the lives of others. “This I command you,” the Lord tells all who would follow him, “love one another” (Jn 15:17).

There are paradoxes here. Joy comes from sacrifice. Love results from keeping God’s commandments, obeying his laws. This is not our contemporary point of view. We prefer to think that joy comes from the satisfaction of human desires. And we seek love by casting off all restraints, and embracing the freedom to do as we please.

This is not the way to “complete joy,” or to an authentic experience of love. In fact, concupiscence, our natural inclination to pursue those things that we both need and want, can only take us so far. Complete happiness must come from transcending our own needs and desires in order to respond to the needs of others.

Pope Francis calls this moving beyond our comfort zone, the borders of self-interest, to reach “the peripheries,” or the margins, of human society. Jesus teaches us by his words and his example that only those who are able to love in selfless and courageous ways can experience true joy.

All during the Easter season, we proclaim our joy. This is what the resurrection of Jesus is all about. By keeping his father’s commandment, the Son of God showed us the way to “lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” In other words, he showed us how to willingly sacrifice our own needs and wants for the good of others and, so, make our joy complete.

He didn’t say it would be easy—or painless—but he promised us that if we follow him, we will find the satisfaction of our deepest hopes and desires. We will “remain in [his] love,” which means we will become one with God, the source of all love and joy.

What does this teaching mean for us, practically speaking? Quite simply, it means that looking out for number one, protecting our turf, and pursuing our own interests at the expense of others, is a dead end. That road leads to loneliness, self-pity and resentment. It does not lead to joy. Or genuine love.

The road to joy is the one that requires us to put God first, and to sacrifice even legitimate desires for the good of others. This is the road followed by Jesus himself, by his Blessed Mother and by all the saints.

It’s a very wide and diverse road (even if it is sometimes described as “the narrow way”) because every person who follows this way does so according to his or her own gifts and historical circumstances. The way St. Alphonsus Liguori denied himself in order to follow Jesus was different from the path taken by many other saints, but each found joy by exchanging self-interest for the good of others.

“No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (Jn 15:13). Pope Francis frequently reminds us that there are countless saints and martyrs throughout history, and even today, who have accepted this teaching as the answer to all our searching for the meaning of life.

This Easter season, let’s find ways to deny our own interests out of love for God and our neighbor. Let’s find joy beyond our comfort zones, as Jesus did, “in the peripheries.” †