A lot of us were raised with the idea that we needed to earn our salvation. God's love was conditional, we thought, and if we weren't good enough, God wouldn't love us. So we had to do a lot of things-- prayers, novenas, fasting, you name it-- to earn our way into God's favor. Perhaps that notion got some traction with us because our families seemed to run on the same principle. We were loved in proportion to how well we did what we were told and followed the rules. The '50's seemed to operate that way. The notion that we can control God by "earning" His love is silly, of course. We're not God and we don't get to say, when we get to the Pearly Gates, that we did all these prescribed things so you've got to let us in. But that's somehow what we thought, and today's reading (Jn 15: 9-11) has a line that feeds into that mind-set. It is the one I quoted in the title: "If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love." At a quick reading that word, "if," seems to make Jesus' love for us conditional. We have to keep the commandments Jesus gives us in order to have His love, the sentance seems to say, especially if we're looking for something like that. But is that really what Jesus is saying? I don't think so. Note for starters what Jesus says earlier in this reading. "As the Father loves me, so I also love you," Jesus says. Do we think the love between Father and Son is conditonal? Of course not. So, by extension, neither is Jesus' love for us. Given that-- if Jesus loves us regardless of what we do-- what is the sentance about remaining in Jesus' love "if" we keep His commandments talking about? Let me point out that the sentance is directed to us. Jesus is saying how we need to act to remain "in" His love. Maybe the issue isn't Jesus' love for us, but our love for Jesus. Maybe Jesus is trying to tell us that we need to honor Jesus' commandments if we want to stay in a loving relationship with Jesus-- "in" Jesus' love, so to speak. The reality is that, while Jesus won't ever stop loving us, we can come to the point where we stop loving Jesus, where we don't care about what is best for Jesus, where we don't care about Jesus at all. How does that happen? It happens in stages, in very small steps, as we decide not to honor Jesus' commandments. We become more wordly, more concerned about ourselves, narcissistic almost, less conscious of God's presence in others, more self-impressed. We conclude we can work things out on our own. We presume to believe that we don't need God. We can get to the point where being in Jesus' love simply doesn't matter, and we choose not to have that relationship. No, we don't earn God's love. We've already got it and nothing we can do will change that. What we can do is walk away from that love, and that's where the danger lies.