Come On, Get Happy

A Reflection on the Gospel for Sunday, May 5, 2024:
Sixth Sunday of Easter

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John
​15.9-17

Jesus said to his disciples: “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.

“I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved 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 do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.

“You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.”

Pause. Pray. Reflect.

In the beginning, God had a feeling.

Well, it was more than that, of course. God begot a Son. And the realm of emotions belongs to the Son, the Second Person, Jesus.

God, as a Trinity, doesn’t have variable human emotions. As Bishop Robert Barron has said, the Trinity is God enjoying Himself. The One God is in a constant state of ekstasis — “standing outside oneself” — that is, ecstasy. It’s perpetual outward movement of love from one to the other, the kind of self-giving love Jesus says He remains in, abides in. “For God to be happy is for God to be God,” says Fr. John Navone, a Jesuit writer.

But the incarnate Jesus did take on our human emotions, hence His “joy” or, in what is perhaps a better translation of the Greek chara, “delight.” One translator posits that the passage might be more effective if divided into paragraphs this way: “I have told you this so that my delight may be in you and your delight might be complete. This is my commandment.” In other words, His commandment is for us to let Him fill us with ecstasy because, when we ourselves are filled, we join the perpetual “loop” of simultaneously filling up and pouring out. Entering the ecstasy loop is the command because, from it, our only course of action is to love one another as He has loved us. 

The same translator theorizes that Jesus continues to say, “You are my friends. If you do what I command you, I no longer call you slaves.” Our friendship is not conditional. Rather, by accepting His invitation to the Triune love-in hyperloop, we gain freedom from our slavery to self-interest. Fr. Navone says, “What God communicates, when he “befriends” us through grace, is the life of eternal friendship which is God.”

When we become a friend of Jesus (who is friend to all), all become our friends, too. Once again, in removing the barrier to us loving strangers as ourselves, we become un-self-centred. We stand outside our centre. Ek-kentron. Eccentric. I know – comes with the territory.

“God is Happiness Itself,’ says Fr. Navone. “Happiness Itself is self-communicating, giving us its Spirit, enabling both our vision, in the eye of love that is faith, and the gaze of love that is contemplation.”

As for contemplation, it has been described by saints as the highest form of prayer, one in which the triune God sweeps us up into that pure unfettered “gaze of love.” Saint Teresa of Avila was well known for her deep contemplative prayer, as is fitting for a Carmelite. She described piercing, intense, painful yet sweet experiences when God brought her up into His realm. Bernini sculpted a famous image of it. He called it the great saint’s “Ecstasy.”



​Kate Mosher

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