THE SAINTS IN A YEAR - ST JOHN AND BEING A BELOVED DISCIPLE

Fr Billy Swan

This week, I conclude the triduum of reflections on saints who were centrally involved in the events of Jesus’s death and resurrection. This week we focus on St John, also known as the Beloved Disciple. This term was not given to John by anyone but himself in the Gospel that bears his name. John is the Beloved Disciple of Jesus, but by using the term instead of his own name, he invites Christians down the ages to see themselves also as beloved disciples of the Lord.

To understand ourselves as beloved, we must first appreciate who it is that loves us. More than any other New Testament writer, St John makes it abundantly clear who God is: "God is love" (1 John 4:8). John came to believe that God is love because of what Jesus revealed about God. Furthermore, God is not just a Being who loves. Rather, God is the essence of love itself and the source of all authentic love. And so, for John, the starting point of the Christian life is not us, but God’s love for us: "We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19). That’s why John records the words of Jesus at the Last Supper as asking us to love one another “just as I have loved you” (John 13:34). We are to love one another, not just with the Master’s example but with his Spirit that dwells within us.

For each Christian and for those enquiring about faith, believing that God’s personal love awaits us to discover it, is the foundation of everything. If we don’t get this right, then everything else will be out of kilter too. If we don’t accept that we are loved or if we constantly try to prove we are loved and look for the validation of others, we will live in a constant sense of insecurity.

The famous Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, was once asked in an interview at the end of his life what was the most important theological insight he had ever acquired. Barth calmly replied ‘Jesus loves me’. For us, the first place we know that ‘Jesus loves me’ is before him and with him in prayer. It is there in that encounter we find ourselves alone before God, where activities, roles and masks are put aside, appearing before him just as we are. It is where we allow ourselves to be accepted by the maternal love of God and to hear the same words of the Father addressed to Jesus at his baptism, addressed also to us: “This is my beloved son/daughter in whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17).

This time of prayer is when we receive the unconditional gift of God’s love each day and align our hearts with the Sacred Heart of Jesus that contains it. This image of the alignment of hearts comes from the beautiful scene at the Last Supper when John, the Beloved Disciple, leaned on Christ’s breast (John 13:23). St Gregory of Nyssa beautifully wrote that “The Lord’s breast is the sponge of the heart” (Commentary on the Song of Songs) and St John Chrysostom taught that prayer “lifts the soul into the heavens where it hugs God in an indescribable embrace. The soul seeks the milk of God like a baby crying for the breast” (Homily 6 on Prayer).

The need to experience this personal, maternal and affectionate love of God is not some kind of disordered desire or excessive neediness. Neither does love remain with affection but translates into justice, sacrifice and suffering if necessary. Yet it is the beginning of faith. As Pope Benedict described: “Faith grows when it is lived as an experience of love received” (Porta fidei, 7). No less that St Bernard of Clairvaux described the lack of affection in people’s lives as “among the many great and grievous evils” (Sermon 50) and many parallels could be drawn here with our culture today.

Nothing can replace God’s gift of love for us, nothing can substitute for his love within us and that is why prayer is the place where we return to time and time again to hear the words of Christ “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Remain in my love” (John 15:9). It is where we go to “think of the love that the Father has lavished on us by letting us be called God’s children for that is what we are” (1 John 3:1).

In this Easter season, renewal begins with us knowing, once again, that ‘Jesus loves me’ and because of that gift, I am a ‘Beloved Disciple’.