-Jesus, found in John 13:35
In the hymn, "They'll Know We Are Christians By Our Love", composer and lyricist Peter Scholtes (1966) reinforces Jesus's teaching that love serves as the hallmark of His disciples. Peter, the Rock upon which Christ established His Church, agrees, "Since you have purified yourselves by obedience to the truth for sincere mutual love, love one another intensely from a [pure] heart. You have been born anew, not from perishable but from imperishable seed, through the living and abiding word of God" (1 Peter 1:22-23).
Others will know we are Christians by our love, and we will only be able to love others with a Christ-like love after first allowing ourselves to be loved by Him.
Christ's love transforms. It heals, restores, cures, strengthens, creates, enlivens, emboldens. It fills us with life and allows us to offer this life - Christ's love - as a gift to others.
"(T)o will the good of another" for the sake of the other (Catechism of the Catholic Church, #1766, quoting St. Thomas Aquinas) stands as a Christian definition of love. Love entails sacrifice. It requires freedom on the parts of both the person loving and the person being loved. Love has nothing to do with coercion and/or conditions. True love goes far beyond pleasure and permissiveness.
As Christians, we believe that God Himself is love. St. John the Evangelist, the beloved disciple, declares this truth of our faith, "Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love" (1 John 4:8) and "God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him" (1 John 4:16).
We also believe that we have been formed in the image and likeness of this God who is love: "Then God said: Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness...God created humankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:26-27).
We were created out of love for love.
But, through sin we reject both the DNA of and the command to love. Choosing ourselves over God and others, being curved in toward ourselves, we rupture the very relationships that should bring us to the fullness of life.
Enter Jesus Christ.
"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him" (John 3:16-17).
Jesus Christ, "way and the truth and the life" (John 14:6), came to repair, re-establish, and restore our relationships with God the Father and with each other. Jesus Christ came to reveal the deepest truth about both God and ourselves: we were created out of love for love.
God's love is extravagant, reckless, transformative, and mysterious. Jesus provides an abundance of wine at the wedding at Cana, the catch of fish tears the nets, and there are plentiful leftovers after feeding the 5,000.
The shepherd forsakes the 99 for the sake of the 1, the Prodigal Son receives a hero's celebration, all of the laborers receive the same wages.
The blind can see, the deaf can hear, the mute can speak, the lame can walk, the possessed can be made clean, the dead can come back to life.
We can receive the fullness of God's love only when we fully give ourselves - as a gift - to God and to others. We can experience freedom in direct proportion to how much we submit ourselves to Christ's yoke. We can be truly alive when we pick up our cross and follow Him.
In order for others to know us as disciples of Christ by our love, we must first be loved - healed, restored, and transformed - by God.
They will know we are Christians by our love.
We will become authentic Christians by His.
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