245th Meditation
“The world must recognise that I love the Father and that I act just as the Father commanded” (Jn 14:31).
In these words, the Lord expresses the great love of his Heart: it is His Heavenly Father.
Perhaps we tend to be more aware of Jesus’ love for us people, and with good reason we say that we can never thank Him enough for what He has done for our salvation. However, if we want to better understand the Heart of our Saviour, we must deeply assimilate these words from the Gospel of St. John: “The world must recognise that I love the Father and that I act just as the Father commanded”. This is what moves Him and what He wants us to understand: His love for the Heavenly Father.
Indeed, the Lord not only wants us to understand this love; He wants us ourselves to love our Heavenly Father as He loves Him. Jesus wants to awaken this love in us, so that we may find our home in it, and proclaim it to all people, for it is available to all.
No one is excluded from this love, as long as they do not close themselves off. And if anyone closes himself, God will stand at his door and knock (cf. Rev 3:20), so that he may open his heart and not be lost. Condemnation, even of a single soul, causes him deep sorrow. The Lord, for his part, kept all those whom the Father had given him, “and not one of them has been lost, except the son of destruction” (Jn 17:12).
Perhaps the Saviour’s greatest sorrow is that someone does not accept the grace that flows from the Father’s Heart to mankind through Him, and instead turns away. It will be a pain for Jesus not to be able to take that person to the Father in eternal glory, as part of his prize of victory.
No one knows the Heart of the Father like Jesus. If we want to love the Father even more, we must ask Jesus to make us partakers of His love for Him. Then our heart will awaken even more and we will discover more and more what Jesus wants to teach us and show us about our Father. Our love will grow, because it will be divine love that will increasingly permeate our human capacity to love.
In His farewell discourse, the Lord said to His disciples: “If you loved me you would be glad that I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I” (Jn 14:28).
Jesus wants to return to the Father and prepare a dwelling place for us (Jn 14:2), so that, together with Him, we may be forever with His great love: the Heavenly Father. He invites us to rejoice with Him, that once His mission is accomplished, He will enter in all His glory where we too will go when we have accomplished our task.