The Joy of Obedience - John 15:9-11

In today's Gospel reading, Jesus spells out the three basic elements of faith: obedience, love, and joy. Love is the center; it holds obedience and joy together. When we disobey, it's because we don't fully understand why it's unloving; we don't realize that our sin interferes with our ability to love and to be loved. On the other hand, when we obey because we love, we experience great joy.
 
Obeying because we love is a mature faith. As children, we first obeyed because we feared punishment. To experience joy however, we have to let go of childish reasons for obeying God's commands. Adult obedience is this: We love God so much that we want to follow Jesus in every way and in every circumstance, because we know that he loves us and that his commands are always based on love (even when we don't understand how so), and we know that we can trust him. When we come to this realization we begin to see how foolish it is to disobey.
 
And when we adopt this fundamental principle, we find that we love others so much that we don't want to sin against them.
 
Love is like the air around us: We can close ourselves up and never breathe the air, which of course leads to death. Likewise, we can close our hearts and never receive the love that is permeating from God in every moment, and therefore our souls slowly die. But when we obey God, imitating the holiness of Christ by following his commandments, we unite ourselves to him and therefore we're immersed in his love and therefore we experience unworldly joy.
 
If we really understand what occurs in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, joy is our primary feeling as we emerge from the confessional. It's a joy that comes from rediscovering that despite our disobedience, God still loves us, and that by reconciling with him we have opened ourselves to receive and experience his love more fully again.
 
In Romans Chapter 3 we hear, “All have sinned and are deprived the glory of God. They are justified freely by his grace through the redemption in Christ Jesus.” We receive grace through justification. We are made new through the saving power of Christ!
 
I remember a comment made at a ChristLife session a couple of years ago that following our reconciliation with God, we become like the newly baptized. Imagine how cleansing and how liberating the Sacrament of Reconciliation really is! We become justified through grace.

Justification isn’t like getting a pardon, like a president gives out pardons at the end of his term. It’s not. It's better than that. Justification is putting someone back in the position they were in before they committed the offense. In a pardon, the president says the person won't be held accountable for the offense, but he can't justify that person. Justification cleans the slate entirely.  We become made new just as a newborn baby was made new at Baptism.
 
Let us contemplate today any command that we have trouble obeying, whether from the Bible or Church teachings. We need to ask the Holy Spirit to reveal to us how this command is based on love. In what ways are we missing or misunderstanding the love that's inherently there?
 
Learning obedience never stops. Even Jesus had to learn obedience. In Hebrews we hear, “Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered; and when he was made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.”
 
In today's first reading, the first Christians had to learn to stretch their love for God to include the Gentiles. We all need to allow God to stretch us beyond our current limits of love. To grow in holiness, we have to grow beyond old, familiar ways of dealing with the laws that we dislike and the people who are unlikable. That's the secret to finding real joy.
 
And so we pray to God today to allow us to see the correlation between obedience, love and joy.  "Dear God, we want to obey you today; help us to stay close to you. Thank you for being so good to us; we love you and want to love you more. Lord Jesus, be our joy. When we are tempted to sin, give us the grace to love others more fully. We want to remain in your love. Help us to model obedience and love to those we come in contact with today, so that we can, in our own small way, help to spread to them eternal salvation through your Son Jesus Christ." Amen