“It is my Father’s glory,” Christ said, “that you should bear abundant fruit and become my disciples.” But even when we have glorified the Father by bearing much fruit and becoming Christ’s disciples, we still have no right to claim the credit for it as though the work were ours alone.
The grace to carry out the work had first to come to us from God,
and so the glory is his, not ours.
That is why Christ is recorded in another place as saying:
“Let your light so shine before others that they may see your
good works”—and here, lest they be tempted to attribute those
good works to themselves, he immediately added: “and may give
the glory for them to your heavenly Father.”
This, then, is the Father’s glory, that we should bear
abundant fruit and become Christ’s disciples, since it is only
through God’s mercy in the first place that we can become the
disciples of Christ.“We are God’s handiwork, created in
Christ Jesus for the performance of good works.”
“As the Father has loved me, Jesus says, so I have loved you. Abide in my love.” There we have the source of every good work of ours. How do they come to be ours? Only because faith is active in love. And how could we ever love, unless we ourselves were loved first?
In his first letter John the evangelist made this quite clear.
“Let us love God, he wrote, because he first loved us.”
The Father does indeed love us, but he does so in his Son; we
glorify the Father by bearing fruit as branches of the vine which is
his son and becoming his disciples.
“Abide in my love,” he says to us. How may we do that? In the words that follow you have your answer. “If you observe what I command you, then you will truly abide in my love.”
But is it love that makes us keep the Lord’s commandments, or
is it the keeping of them that makes us love him? There can be no
doubt that love comes first.
Anyone devoid of love will lack all incentive to keep the
commandments. When, therefore, Christ says to us: “If you keep
my commandments, you will abide in my love,” he is telling us
that the observance of the commandments is not the source but rather
the gauge and touchstone of our love.
It is as though he said to us: Do not suppose you are abiding in my
love if you are not keeping my commandments, for it is by observing
them that you will abide in my love. That is to say, your observance
of my commandments is the proof, the outward manifestation, of the
fact that you abide in my love.
Let no one, then, who neglects to keep the divine commandments
deceive himself by protesting his love for God. It is only to the
extent to which we keep the Lord’s commandments that we abide
in his love; insofar as we fail to keep them we fail to love.
Yet even when we do keep God’s commandments, it is not
something we do in order to make God love us, for unless he loved us
first we should not be able to keep them. It is the gift of his
grace, a grace which is accessible to the humble of heart, but
beyond the reach of the proud.
Homilies on the Gospel of John 82, 1-4: CCL 36, 532-534
Augustine (354-430) was born at Thagaste in
Africa and received a Christian education, although he was not
baptized until 387. In 391 he was ordained priest and in 395 he
became coadjutor bishop to Valerius of Hippo, whom he succeeded in
396. Augustine’s theology was formulated in the course of
his struggle with three heresies: Manicheism, Donatism, and
Pelagianism. His writings are voluminous and his influence on
subsequent theology immense. He molded the thought of the Middle
Ages down to the thirteenth century. Yet he was above all a pastor
and a great spiritual writer.
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Journey with the Fathers
Commentaries on the Sunday Gospels
- Year C, pp. 34-35.
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