Jesus’ Commandment

Today's Reflections

      

Jesus’ Commandment

Jn 15:12-17

[Jesus said to his disciples,] ¹²“This is my commandment: love one another as I love you. ¹³No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. ¹⁴You are my friends if you do what I command you. ¹⁵I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father. ¹⁶It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you. ¹⁷This I command you: love one another.”

To lay down one’s life for one’s friends. Jesus’ laying down his life for us is mirrored in our many martyrs for the faith.

San Pedro Calungsod, canonized on 21 October 2012 together with six others, is the second Filipino saint. He suffered a heroic death in Tumon, Guam, on 2 April 1672 at a very young age of 17. He died a martyr for the Christian faith together with the Jesuit superior of the Guam mission, Fr. Diego de Sanvitores. Their speared bodies were dumped into the sea by their attackers. The young sacristan and catechist preferred to die at the side of the good Padre like a true soldier of Christ.

Ricardo Cardinal Vidal, archbishop-emeritus of Cebu and proponent of the cause of Pedro Calungsod from the very start, talked about it as a choice between loving and refusing to love. “He may not have known it in an explicit way. He may not have learned the nuances of the choice, but love is its articulation. One is simply enamored, and once love enters the heart, it sets up its own classroom within, making the heart its own school and disciple at same time” (Homily during the Post-Beatification Vespers at the Pontificio Collegio Filippino in Rome).

“Only with difficulty does one die for a just person,

though perhaps for a good person

one might even find courage to die.

But God proves his love for us in that

while we were still sinners Christ died for us”

(Rom 5:7-8).