Dear Saints,

In this weekend’s Gospel, Jesus confronts us with the simplest, clearest, and hardest commandment ever offered: Love one another.

This is the mandatum novum, the new mandate, command, or law.

Saint Augustine once offered that the command is new because it renews the one who obeys it. “When we love as he loved us,” he writes, “we become new men, heirs of the new covenant and singers of the new song."

I’d offer, further, that the newness of the command is a matter of the mode of this love, the depth and type of this love. We are to love one another in the same way that Jesus has loved us.

What we see in Jesus is simply pure self-gift. That shouldn’t surprise us, as God is an eternal exchange of outpouring, glorifying love, and in Jesus this love takes flesh for God’s glory and the good of the world.

We can only reflect this love, which we come to know most truly and fully in and as Christ Jesus, by sharing in God’s own blessed life. Our Confirmation Mass this Friday reminded me of how determined God is to sustain us in his service with his own life of love, his own Spirit, and how eager we must be in response to make that love flesh for each other and for a waiting world. Please join me in prayer for those who are newly confirmed in the Faith, who are now fully equipped for the task!

In the Peace of our Risen Lord,

Father Daniel
δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ