Patristic Wisdom: Looking to the Sixth Sunday of Easter

As the Father loved Me, I also have loved you; abide in My love. If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love, just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love. These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full. This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends. You are My friends if you do whatever I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you. You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain, that whatever you ask the Father in My name He may give you. These things I command you, that you love one another. (John 15:9–17)

How great a measure can a man then find to the love of Christ, He Himself shows when He says that nothing can be greater than such love, which excites to forsake life itself for those one loves. And by all this, He not only exhorts His own disciples that it becomes them so little to shrink from fearing to encounter dangers for those they love but that also He Himself without shrinking held Himself in utmost readiness to undergo the death of the flesh. For the power of our Savior’s love attained so great a measure. And these words were borne out by His action, and by His encouragement to His disciples to attain an exceedingly great and extraordinary courage, and by His exhorting them to the perfection of brotherly love, and fencing their hearts with the armor of enthusiasm and love of God, and raising them up into a zeal invincible and undaunted, so as impetuously to hasten to establish everything according to His good pleasure.…

When therefore, then, he has abundantly comforted them with the words of consolation, and with respect to those things at which they would be likely to be cast down, persuading them in turn to rejoice, He again incites them by His injunctions to diligence to a confident courage; persuading them to change their minds and rather to rejoice at those things at which they had not without reason been dismayed, and charges them to display the utmost zeal, and put into practice an overflowing measure of brotherly love, and to benefit those as yet without faith, and to hasten by the words and deeds that make for righteousness to draw those who are astray to a willingness to be united to God by faith.

Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel of John 10