Church Fathers Commentary John 15:12-16

"This is my commandment, that ye love one another, even as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are my friends, if ye do the things which I command you. No longer do I call you servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I heard from my Father, I have made known unto you. Ye did not choose me, but I chose you, and appointed you, that ye should go and bear fruit, and [that] your fruit should abide: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you." — John 15:12-16 (ASV)

Theophylact of Ohrid: Having said, If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love, He shows what commandments they are to keep: This is My commandment, that you love one another.

St. Gregory the Great: But when all our Lord’s sacred discourses are full of His commandments, why does He give this special commandment regarding love? Is it not because every commandment teaches love, and all precepts are one? Love, and love only, is the fulfillment of everything that is commanded. Just as all the boughs of a tree proceed from one root, so all the virtues are produced from the one virtue of love. Nor does the branch—that is, the good work—have any life unless it abides in the root of love.

St. Augustine of Hippo: Where love is, what can be lacking? Where it is not, what can be of any profit? But this love is distinguished from the love people have for each other as mere human beings by the addition, As I have loved you. For what purpose did Christ love us, if not so that we might reign with Him? Therefore, let us love one another in such a way that our love is different from that of other people, who do not love each other for the purpose of loving God, because they do not really love at all. Those who love one another for the sake of having God within them—they are the ones who truly love one another.

St. Gregory the Great: The highest, and indeed the only, proof of love is to love our adversary. The Truth Himself did this when, while suffering on the cross, He showed His love for His persecutors, saying, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do (Luke 23:34). The consummation of this love is given in the words that follow: Greater love has no man than this, that a man 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 win over our enemies, so that those who persecute us are, by anticipation, our friends.

St. Augustine of Hippo: Having said, This is My commandment: that you love one another, even as I have loved you, it follows, as John said in his Epistle, that as Christ laid down His life for us, so we should lay down our lives for the brethren (1 John 3:16). The martyrs have done this with ardent love. Therefore, in commemorating them at Christ’s table, we do not pray for them as we do for others; rather, we pray that we may follow in their footsteps. For they have shown the same love for their brother that has been shown to them at the Lord’s table.

St. Gregory the Great: But whoever in a time of tranquility will not give his time to God, how will he give up his soul in a time of persecution? Therefore, let the virtue of love be nourished in tranquility by deeds of mercy, so that it may be victorious in tribulation.

St. Augustine of Hippo: From one and the same love, we love God and our neighbor—but we love God for His own sake, and our neighbor for God’s sake. So, while there are two precepts of love on which hang all the Law and the Prophets (to love God and to love our neighbor), Scripture often unites them into one. For if a person loves God, it follows that he does what God commands; and if so, he also loves his neighbor, since God has commanded this. This is why He continues, You are My friends, if you do whatsoever I command you.

St. Gregory the Great: A friend is, as it were, a keeper of the soul. He who keeps God’s commandments is rightly called His friend.

St. Augustine of Hippo: What great condescension! Though keeping his Lord’s commandments is only what a good servant is required to do, yet if they do so, He calls them His friends. The good servant is both a servant and a friend. But how can this be? He tells us: Henceforth I call you not servants, for the servant knows not what his Lord does.

Should we, therefore, cease to be servants as soon as we become good servants? Is not a good and trusted servant sometimes entrusted with his master’s secrets while still remaining a servant? We must understand, then, that there are two kinds of servitude, just as there are two kinds of fear. There is a fear that perfect love casts out, which includes a servitude that will be cast out along with the fear. And there is another, a pure fear, which remains forever.

It is the first kind of servitude our Lord refers to when He says, Henceforth I call you not servants, for the servant knows not what his Lord does. He is not referring to the state of the servant to whom it is said, Well done, you good servant, enter you into the joy of your Lord (Matthew 25:21), but of the one of whom it was said, The servant abides not in the house for ever, but the Son abides ever.

Since God has given us the power to become sons of God, we are, in a wonderful way, both servants and yet not servants, and we know that it is the Lord who accomplishes this. The other kind of servant is ignorant of this reality—the one who “knows not what his Lord does.” When this servant does anything good, he becomes exalted in his own conceit, as if he himself did it and not his Lord. He boasts in himself, not in his Lord.

Theophylact of Ohrid: It is as if He said: “The servant does not know the counsels of his lord, but since I consider you friends, I have communicated My secrets to you.”

St. Augustine of Hippo: But how did He make known to His disciples all things that He had heard from the Father, when He refrained from saying many things because He knew they could not yet bear them? He made all things known to His disciples in the sense that He knew He would make them known to them in that fullness of which the Apostle spoke: Then we shall know, even as we are known (1 Corinthians 13:12). For just as we look forward to the death of the flesh and the salvation of the soul, so we should look forward to that knowledge of all things which the Only-Begotten heard from the Father.

St. Gregory the Great: Alternatively, “all things” refers to everything He heard from the Father that He wished to be made known to His servants: the joys of spiritual love and the pleasures of our heavenly country, which He impresses daily on our minds by the inspiration of His love. For when we love the heavenly things we hear about, we come to know them by loving them, because love is itself a form of knowledge. He had, therefore, made all things known to them because, having been withdrawn from earthly desires, they burned with the fire of divine love.

St. John Chrysostom: “All things” means all things that they needed to hear. The phrase I have heard shows that what He taught was not a strange doctrine, but one He had received from the Father.

St. Gregory the Great: But let no one who has attained this dignity of being called the friend of God attribute this superhuman gift to his own merits. As the Lord says: You have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you.

St. Augustine of Hippo: What ineffable grace! For what were we before Christ chose us, but wicked and lost? We did not believe in Him in order to be chosen by Him, for if He had chosen us because we believed, He would have chosen us in the act of our choosing Him.

This passage refutes the vain opinion of those who say that we were chosen before the foundation of the world because God foreknew that we would be good, not that He Himself would make us good. For if He had chosen us because He foreknew we would be good, He would also have foreknown that we would first choose Him—for without choosing Him, we cannot be good. Can anyone be called good who has not chosen what is good?

What, then, has He chosen in those who are not good? You cannot say, “I am chosen because I believed,” for if you had believed in Him, you would have already chosen Him. Nor can you say, “Before I believed, I did good works, and therefore was chosen.” For what good work can exist before faith? What is there for us to say, then, but that we were wicked and were chosen, so that by the grace of the One who chose us, we might become good?

They are chosen, then, before the foundation of the world, according to that predestination by which God foreknew His own future acts. They are chosen out of the world by that call through which God fulfills what He has predestined: whom He did predestine, them He also called (Romans 8:30).

Observe, He does not choose those who are already good; rather, He makes good those whom He has chosen. As He says, And I have ordained you that you should go and bring forth fruit. This is the fruit He meant when He said, Without Me you can do nothing. He Himself is the way in which He has set us to go.

St. Gregory the Great: I have set you—that is, “I have planted you by grace”—that you should go—that is, “by an act of your will.” To will is to go forward in the mind, and to bring forth fruit is to do so by your works. He then shows what kind of fruit they should bring forth: And that your fruit may remain. Worldly labor hardly produces fruit that lasts for our lifetime; and even 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, therefore, produce such fruit as will remain—fruit of which death, which destroys everything else, will be the beginning.

St. Augustine of Hippo: Love, then, is one fruit, existing now in desire only, not yet in fullness. Yet even with this desire, whatever we ask in the name of the Only-Begotten Son, the Father gives us, as Jesus said: That whatsoever you shall ask the Father in My name, He may give it you. We ask in the Savior’s name whenever we ask for something that will be profitable to our salvation.