Commandments Series Part 4: "Love One Another As I Have Loved You" (Unconditionally)?

Love others like Jesus loves us?  This seems like Mission Impossible.  How can we "mere mortals" – we helpless, wretched sinners EVER comply with Jesus’ commandment to love others as he loves us?  Our love is conditional – we only love people who love us back or people who we think can provide something to us that we need, and when they don’t love us back or give us what we need we tend to withhold our love from them.  What about loving our enemies?  Who among us loves our enemies as Jesus commanded us?  It seems impossible.  Our love is just so far from being divine.  Instead of divine, our love is indeed very human and entangled with all of our human weaknesses like pride, fear, jealousy, envy, etc. 

Now where did all those human weaknesses come from?  Is it possible that God created them; that God built them into us when he created us?  No, that’s not possible because God only creates perfection.  But if God didn’t create our imperfections, then where did they come from and who is responsible for them?  Well if we’re willing to be honest with ourselves, it must be us – it must be we ourselves and no one else who are the ones responsible for our imperfections, and it is those imperfections that make us different from what we were created to be, and that is sons and daughters of almighty God. 

The simple, yet infinitely profound truth is that in order to love one another as Jesus loves us, we must change to become more like Jesus and therefore more like the children of God we were created to be.

Sometimes it is very hard for us to accept the fact that God is our Father, but it is the truth.  What were Jesus’ first words when the Disciples asked him how to pray?  Wasn’t it “OUR FATHER who art in heaven”?

This then is the premise of this book: that in order to love one another as Jesus loves us we must shed our limited concepts of ourselves and any imperfect beliefs, attitudes, and thoughts that make us less than we were created to be.  We must shed our illusions of what seems to be important in life and reclaim our divine identity as children of God.  This is the task, and the “Commandments of Christ” is the process.  The single richest source of the commandments of Christ is found in the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew Chapters 5 through 7.

In this book we will systematically examine the first eight of these commandments contained in what has become known as the Eight Beatitudes.  The perspective from which the Beatitudes are examined is key to understanding them.  This book was not written from an indifferent, neutral perspective, nor was it written from the perspective of “hopeless sinner”.  Instead, the examination of each Beatitude is conducted from the perspective of child of God seeking to find their way home to the kingdom of God and the abundant life.

Bible scholars, including St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Augustine agree that the Sermon on the Mount represents among the most advanced and profound spiritual teachings.  Jesus spent nearly three years teaching the disciples day and night.  It is illogical and unlikely that advanced teachings like those contained within the Sermon on the Mount were the kinds of teachings with which Jesus initiated his disciples, but rather the kinds of teachings that represent the culmination, the apex of understanding that the disciples were able to absorb.  For this reason several initial chapters are devoted to attempting to prepare our hearts and minds as Jesus did with the disciples before proceeding with the examination of the Commandments of Christ contained within the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount; Jesus Christ’s prologue to “the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven”.