The Gospel for Friday of the fifth week of Easter is taken from St. John 15th chapter, 12th to the 17th verse. Jesus said to his disciples, this is my commandment. Love one another as I love you. No one has greater love than this to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.

I no longer call you slaves because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I’ve called you friends because I have told you everything I’ve heard from my Father. It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain. So whatever you ask the Father in My name he will give you this. I command you. Love one another.

There is something about trusting a friend and being able to reveal to them things that we know and that we feel. Jesus used that as an example of his relationship with us. But you can’t fully grasp it until you realize what Jesus is doing for the first time in the history of the human race is revealing the fullness of who God really is. What a thing to tell the world. Jesus, the man, the human side of him, was hearing all this for the first time, in a sense, and he shared it with people because he knew how transformative it was and how different it was from the fullness of the Old Testament, which didn’t get close enough to revealing the fullness of who God really is. We need to bask and live in this new knowledge with an open heart.

Sam. Satan. Let us pray. Father, to know you is to fall in love with you. And to fall in love with you is to know what life is for and how we are to live. So we know that your love is never conditional on our performance, but rather, in a sense, the reward of our belief that you are the lover you say you are.

You are the healer in all of us that we now possess. Let us feel the joy and the peace that that brings. And we ask this in Jesus name, Amen.