Love one another.  This new commandment given by our Lord to his disciples is a challenge that continues to confront us even today.  How can we live the commandment of love?  This world that we encounter every day of our lives does not seem to be a place particularly well suited for love.  Our hearts are created for love and there is a deep desire and need for love in our hearts and yet true and authentic love remains elusive.  We wait for love’s call in our lives and still we cannot find the way.  The world is a place of competition and conflict that seems to pit us one against the other in a struggle for survival.  Where does love’s journey begin and where will it lead us if we are to abandon ourselves to its demands?

    As human persons created for love and gifted with freedom our journey into love must begin with a decision.  It would be easy in our world today to be cynical, selfish and skeptical and doubt that any true love really exists.  Seeing the great conflicts in our world and the failure of relationships it would be easy to take up a skeptical position on love and assert that it is only an ideal, dream or fantasy in life.  Looking at the world through the perception of the media and the reports of human abuse, our senses tell us that love does not truly exist in the world.  Our world seems to be a cold, heartless and cruel place of struggle, conflict and suffering.  As Pat Benatar put it in her ballad, “Love is a battlefield.”  Our image of a crucified Christ seems to affirm the cruel destiny of love in a world of struggles.  Is there any other way to see beyond the strife of worldly struggles?  Jesus would answer us with a call to a decision of faith.  We must have the courage to believe even in the darkness of night.  As disciples of Jesus we must follow in his way of love that chooses to believe in a love that is stronger than death.Pope Benedict begins his encyclical on God’s love with the assertion, “We have come to believe in God’s love: in these words the Christian can express the fundamental decision of his life. Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.” (DCE 1)

    Our encounter with the Risen Christ, Jesus the Lord, calls us to a new way of life, a new order, in which love is life’s greatest demand.  We must love one another.  This love does not arise out of a natural feeling or sentiment that we experience for one another, in fact, we are not all that lovable as human persons.  Rather, love finds its source in the love of God and the power of that love to raise us up above the meanness of the world.  Jesus tells his disciples today in the gospel, “My children, I will be with you only a little while longer. I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another. This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”  We begin to see the real possibility of love in the love with which Jesus has loved us and shared with us in a communion of life.  “As I have loved you,” becomes the source of grace and mercy that allows us to begin the journey of love.  Our decision to follow where this love leads us is the beginning of the Christian life.

    Our journey of faith begins at the foot of the cross where we can look up and see the love that flows out of the pierced heart of Jesus.  Faith helps us to see beyond the cruelty of suffering that Christ is enduring and see into the immense ocean of love that exists in his most sacred heart.  Pope Benedict put it this way, “This is love in its most radical form. By contemplating the pierced side of Christ (cf. 19:37), we can understand the starting-point: “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8). It is there that this truth can be contemplated. It is from there that our definition of love must begin. In this contemplation the Christian discovers the path along which his life and love must move.”  (DCE 12)  Our journey begins in a mystical way as we enter by means of faith into the side of Christ, into his sacred heart and through prayer and contemplation of his divine heart of love we can begin to see the possibility of a new way of life. 

    We can indeed love one another if we love through the sacred heart of Jesus.  Devotion to the sacred heart of our Lord gives us a new hope and it is only in the grace of his love that we see the possibility of a love that can be practiced in our daily lives.  His pierced, sacred heart and the sacramental life that flows forth from it in blood and water, gives us the courage to respond to his command to love one another and to change the world in the light of that love.