Vigils Reading – 3rd Sunday of Lent

ABIDE IN GOD’S LOVE

From a commentary by St Augustine of Hippo

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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 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 these 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 did they come to

be ours? Only because faith is alive 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 motive 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 that 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 commandments deceive

himself by protesting his love for God. It is only to the extent that we keep the

Lord’s commandments that we abide in his love; insofar as we fail to keep them

we fail in 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.