This is my commandment, That you love one another, as I have loved you.
All Commentaries on John 15:12 Go To John 15
Gregory The Dialogist
AD 604
But when all our Lord’s sacred discourses are full of His commandments, why does He give this special commandment respecting love, if it is not that every commandment teaches love, and all precepts are one? Love and love only is the fulfillment of every thing that is enjoined. As all the boughs of a tree proceed from one root, so all the virtues are produced form one love: nor has the branch, i.e. the good work, any life, except it abide in the root of love.
The highest, the only proof of love, is to love our adversary; as did the Truth Himself, who while He suffered on the cross, showed His love for His persecutors: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do (Luke 23:34). Of which love the consummation is given in the next words Greater love has no man than this, that aman lay down his life for his friends. Our Lord came to die for His enemies, but He says that He is going to lay down His life for His friends, to show us that by loving, we are able to gain over our enemies, so that they who persecute us are by anticipation our friends.
But whoever in time of tranquillity will not give up his time to God, how in persecution will he give up his soul? Letthe virtue of love then, that it may be victorious in tribulation, be nourished in tranquillity by deeds of mercy.
A friend is as it were a keeper of the soul. He who keeps God’s commandments, is rightly called His friend.
Or all things which He heard from the Father, which He wished to be made known to His servants: the joys of spiritual love, the pleasures of our heavenly country, which He impresses daily on our minds by the inspiration of His love. For while we love the heavenly things we hear, we know them by loving, because love is itself knowledge. He had made all things known to them then, because being withdrawn from earthly desires, they burned with the fire of divine love.
But let no one who has attained to this dignity of being called the friend of God, attribute this superhuman gift tohis own merits: You have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you.
I have set you, i.e., have planted you by grace, that you should go by will: to willbeing to go in mind, and bring forth fruit, by works. What kind of fruit they should bring forth He then shows: And that your fruit may remain; for worldly labor hardly produces fruit to last our life; and if it does, death comes at last, and deprives us of it all. But the fruit of our spiritual labors endures even after death; and begins to be seen at the very time that the results of our carnal labor begin to disappear. Let us then produce such fruits as may remain, and of which death, which destroys every thing, will be the commencement.
