No Performance Standard

One of my favorite passages in the Gospels is found in Matthew 19:16-30 where the rich young man comes to Our Lord to ask what he needs to do to in order to be perfect. Pay particular attention to Our Lord’s response to this man. Some translations have it, “Jesus looked at him and loved him…” or “Jesus looked at him with love…” Before our blessed Savior responds to the man’s question, he loves him.

I hope my reader has had the experience of love on a human level. In human love one of our greatest experiences is the sheer delight of being with the beloved. “The lover seeks union with the beloved.” is an old saying but very true. Even in the pernicious relationships that only seem like true love, this desire to be with the other is all-consuming, we want to be united with the object of our desire, even if only physically.

The problem with human love, at least most of the time, is that we cannot perfectly love our beloved nor do we ever really feel perfect love from them. Human love tends to have restrictions and a performance matrix. Consider the first love of an adolescent. Warm feelings of tenderness usually come about from the physical appeal or the personality of the object of our love. And this is a good thing!

But when the object of our love falls short of our expectations, this merely human love can sometimes falter. It’s a little embarrassing to recount, but I remember having a crush on someone in middle school where she came to school on a Monday morning with a large pimple on her forehead. How hideous she was! Although she had several classes with me during the day and we frequently ate lunch with a group of our peers, I couldn’t stand to look at her!

The Divine Love, on the other hand, sees our pimples and still loves us. Even our defects and faults that are not clear to us are known to the Beloved, yet he still loves us. He desires the good for us and even works for that end. He loves us despite ourselves and works for us so that we can attain a likeness to His Son.

I used to think that God’s love for me was akin to my love for others, on a human level. On some deep emotional plane, I could not see that God loved me for who I am, for my personhood, that His love for me was the sustaining motion of my being. Despite my sins and numerous derelictions of duty, my Tender Savior was constantly reaching out his arms to hold me and sustain me.

There’s a kind of pride and inflated ego that operates in the soul of someone who thinks that he has to perform for God. To say that God’s love for us is dependent upon our fidelity to the Gospel is to hold out a performance standard for God’s love. But we’re told over and over in scripture that God’s love is unconditional.

For the rich young man cited above, St. Matthew doesn’t say, “Because of his prior fidelity to the Commandments, Jesus looked at him and loved him…” It doesn’t say, “Jesus, seeing the good works of the rich young man called him to perform more rigorously…"

St. Matthew says very clearly, “Jesus looked on him and loved him.” (Mk 10:21) Not because of what he had done in the past nor because of some estimation of what the man would do in the future, but merely because the rich young man was the object of His love.

If we read to the end of the story, the young man went away sad because he did not want to perform to the higher standard to which Our Lord was calling him, but the Gospel writers do not say that Our Lord stopped loving him. After the man left, he was still loved by God.

It’s true that Our Lord says, “If you love me, keep my commandments.” (John 14:15) But what the Sacred Text does not say is that if you’d don’t keep his commandments He will stop loving us. God loves even the demons in hell; the problem is that his love burns them because they do not accept it. Their refusal to cooperate with Grace is what makes them burn.

Let’s not make God’s love burn us. Let us pray for receptivity to God’s love, realizing that it is the basis for our conversion. I’m convinced that the chaos caused by scruples of conscience and the emotional pain we feel after we sin are the results of God’s love burning within us and calling us to greater conformity with His holy Will.

After we've accepted God's merciful love, let us share that love with others. Let's drop the performance standards that we set out for people and simply share God's love with them.

Praised be the Holy Name!