To be like Christ means above all to love. It is even a commandment for us to be like Him in this regard. “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (John XV. 12). After Christ had told the Apostles this, He went on to explain that this love required us to be ready and eager to sacrifice our lives for others. All through the New Testament, in the words of Jesus and of His Apostles, the Christian life consists principally in the love of others. “God is love” (1 John IV. 8), and, “if God so loved us (as He loved us in Christ), we also ought to love one another” (1 John IV. 10). The love we give to others is not something we take from God. When we love, we love with the very love God has for us; and when we love men, we are loving God in them. “As long as you did so to one of the least of these my brethren,” Jesus told us, “you did so to me” (Matthew XXV. 40).
This seems to be one of the lessons of the resurrection. If we look for the deeper reasons why those who had known Jesus at first failed to recognize Him after the resurrection, it seems probable that Jesus wanted it so in order to prepare the disciples and the Church for the essential Christian life, the life of love. He was acting out His own parable of the judgment. From now on, He seemed to say, you will not see Me in the form you have been used to. But you will be able to find Me in every man, in the gardener, the pilgrim, the dignified stranger, in the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the prisoners. But you will only recognize Me if you go to meet every man with love.
Charles J. Callan, OP and John F. McConnell, MM
Spiritual Riches of the Rosary Mysteries
