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A reading from the Gospel of John

Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man is glorified and God is glorified in him. If God is glorified in him, God will glorify the Son in himself, and will glorify him at once.

 “My children, I will be with you only a little longer. You will look for me, and just as I told the Jews, so I tell you now: Where I am going, you cannot come.

 “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

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Some people get a little wrapped up in Jesus saying ‘love one another’, they can be a bit silly about it as if he is saying something he isn’t.   There are four different types of love,

By unconditional we mean that whatever we do, no matter how much we upset someone, or how much they feel we have let them down, we will still love them. God is like that too.

While it’s important that we have a relationship with God, what’s more important is that God loves us, that where the emphasis lies.

Just as you would suffer if your parents didn’t love you, live would be insufferable if God did not love us. But when Jesus talks of loving one another he does not speak of that unconditional love either. He is talking about a different kind of love.

By saying ‘love one another’ he is saying ‘want the best for one another’. What we also need to understand is that ‘want the best for each other’ is not the same as ‘help people get what they want’, because very often, what people want is not what is best for them.

Take for example the fact that you are in school, so that you can get an education, you can learn things, you can take those things into the big wide world, you can help yourself by supporting yourself, and supporting others, let alone your family, you’ll pay tax and that will help support everyone in the country.

If you ever find yourself doing something you know you shouldn’t, something you know is wrong, no matter how you feel about it, if you are in the wrong place, or you are rude to your parents, or a member of staff, if you have a friend who supports you, then get new friends, You deserve better friends than the ones who will say ‘yeah, I’m with you’, because that’s not the best for you and you know it.

But we too need to be a friend, and when we are to be a true friend, it often takes sacrifice.

It can be hard to tell our friends ‘No, you need to make amends there’ but it is what we are called to do in this new commandment of which Jesus speaks.

St Joseph’s  helped with this at Christmas when we did the hamper campaign, at Lent when we did the same.  We have raised money for Ghana, bought tickets for SJC Live, or for Global Awareness, helped at the British Home across the road, picked up litter around the local area, all those things that we do to make things better for others.

If the world got out of the habit of helping others, who would help us? And it’s those that help us who end up at the final destination for us all, Heaven, It’s worth striving to be a saint in Heaven, because the alternative is not very attractive, and is void of God’s love.

What can you do to ensure you become a saint?