Can you love another without being their friend?

Readings for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year B

Anyone who has been in a long-term relationship knows that loving another person is as much about daily reconciling as it is about feeling love. Perhaps that is why Jesus today says, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” You would think that sacrificing yourself for someone you don’t know, someone you might not even like, would be the greatest kind of love. Yet the beauty and challenge of Jesus’s command is that first we must become friends. That includes even those who annoy us, or don’t look like us, or don’t vote or pray or sing like us.

Though master and Lord, Jesus modeled that kind of love when he chose to make himself servant to those who would serve him. Though sinless, Jesus made himself companion to those steeped in sin. For this is how much God loves us: that God would not remain apart from us but would bend down to become one with us to make his dwelling among us.

If we are to love one another as Jesus loved us, we must become friends, even with our enemies. From that relationship of friendship, then can we show the greatest kind of love.

This post was first published on the planner page for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year B, in “GIA Quarterly: A Liturgical Music Journal,” Vol 29, No 1.

Image credit: Andrew Shiau, unsplash, CC0.