The Abiding Fruitfulness of Love
Gospel Reflection for John 15:9-17
You can find today’s readings on the USCCB website.
This reading often gives me great comfort. Twice I hear Jesus say, “I love you.” The whole of the Paschal Mystery can be truly summed up in this phrase. Most times we don’t substantially know what that love really is. It took Jesus to show us what love really looks like. And millennia later he is still showing us what it looks like.
When I take the time to reflect on Jesus’ words, I can find myself yet caught up in Jesus’ desire to be in relationship with me; to be in relationship with you. He wants us to be a part of his life both now and eternally. He longs to meet us in sacred and intimate relationship, as a bridegroom to his bride, desiring to lavishly love us. The more receptive we are to his love, the more we remain in him and abide in his love. To abide in him is to turn over all of ourselves to his love. In doing this, he makes us more like him and we can share his very life with others through mutually abiding with our bridegroom.
This is the gift we bear in our very being as baptised members of his mystical body – we, the ecclesia, are sacrament. We are the living presence of Christ to the world, sustained each week through intimate prayer but especially when we come together as his body to offer ourselves to him, vulnerably and receptively, stripped down and exposed as a bride and groom on the night of their marriage – at the table of the Lord.
Does it make us nervous? We are meant to bring everything of ourselves to our Lord at the Mass and offer it as a spiritual sacrifice to him. His glory is our free offering to him of ourselves, our free offering of his great Love back to the Father:
Through him, and with him, and in him,
O God, almighty Father,
in the unity of the holy spirit,
all glory and honor is yours,
for ever and ever.
And the people say, “Amen.”
It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you
and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remainJn 15:16
Let us consider our self-offering at the marriage bed of the bridegroom, for he has appointed us to bear the fruit of his love in us to the world.
May the peoples praise you, God;
may all the peoples praise you.
Psalm 67:6
Amen, just beautiful!!!!