Entering into the Greater Love, Sixth Sunday of Easter (B), May 9, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs, Auriesville, NY
Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year B
May 9, 2021
Acts 10:25-26.34-35.44-48, Ps 98, 1 Jn 4:7-10, Jn 15:9-17

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• It is a wonderful joy, on this Mothers’ Day, to open the season of Masses at this Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs. As we pray with gratitude to God for all our mothers living or deceased through whose yes to life we were conceived, born, nourished, raised and nurtured in faith, we also thank God the Father for the Woman he chose to be the mother of Jesus and whom Jesus himself chose on Calvary to be our mother. Like Saint John at the foot of the Cross and beyond, here at this beautiful shrine, we gratefully receive anew the gift of the Mother who can the martyrs like Rene Goupil, Jean de Lalande and Isaac Jogues strong until death and can make young people like Kateri Tekakwitha seek to know and do the will of God in holiness all their days.
• Mother’s Day is one in which we contemplate the gift of love: unmerited, limitless, sacrificial, patient, kind, enduring, faithful, hopeful, truthful and joyful (see 1 Cor 13:4-7). And that contemplation necessarily brings us to the source of such love. St. John tells us in today’s second reading that motherly love, in fact all human love, comes from God. “In this is love,” he told the first Christians, “not that we have loved God, but that he has loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.” He summons us, “Let us love one another, because love is of God. Everyone who loves is begotten of God and knows God.” All love essentially goes back to the one who told us through the prophet Isaiah that his love for us is greater than the combined love of all mothers for their old children. “Can a mother,” God asked, “forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even should she forget,” he emphatically declared, “I will never forget you” (Is 49:15).
• And so today, we ponder not just the love of our moms, not just the love of our spiritual mother, Mary, Queen of Martyrs, but the far greater love of God that inspires and makes all love possible. And that brings us to today’s Gospel, which I think contain the most powerful words ever enunciated.
• Jesus tells us, “Just as the Father loves me, so I love you.” We know that God the Father cannot possibly love God the Son more perfectly, or deeply, or better than he does. And Jesus is saying that he loves us just as much, just as profoundly, just as completely as God the Father loves him. This is the true foundation of the Christian life, to live in the love of God. God the Father so loved us that he gave his only Son so that we might not perish but have eternal life. God the Son loved us by freely and lovingly giving that life in order to save ours. God the Holy Spirit is that love between the Father and the Son and hence, since Jesus loves us like the Father loves him, the Holy Spirit is, by application, mysteriously the love between Jesus and us. Since as St. John tells us in the second reading, “God is love,” God wishes to bring us into his interpersonal, Trinitarian communion of love, and that’s what Jesus’ and the Holy Spirit’s missions seek to achieve.
• We all know how being loved can turn someone’s life right side up. I remember when I was a high school chaplain. Boys who used to come to high school with their shirts sloppy, their ties crooked, their hair a Mess, would all of a sudden come in with shirts and pants pressed, the double windsor knot perfect, with every strand of hair shampooed and combed or gelled in place. When I would note the positive change that had taken place within them and ask, “What’s her name?,” they would think I was a soul-reading genius. But what was going on was crystal clear: they had fallen in love and that love gave meaning to everything they did, including how they prepared for school. If this is what can happen with a teenage crush, imagine what is supposed to happen when we realize that God loves us with an infinite, unchanging love? If the words “I love you” can make a dramatic difference in a young person’s existence, what about Jesus’ saying, “I love you just as the Father loves me?”
• In one of the most famous passages of his pontificate, Saint John Paul II stated, “Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it” (Redemptor Hominis, 10) If this is true about the human love we find in the family, in friendships, and in marriage, how much more is it true about the love of God? There’s a reason for this: since we’re made in the image and likeness of God who is love, if we don’t live in love, if we don’t dwell in a loving communion of persons, then we’re lost before God, before others, and within ourselves. That’s why Jesus says to us, emphatically, that he loves us, and that he loves us as purely and perfectly as the Father loves him.
• But Jesus doesn’t stop there. He tells us, “Remain in my love.” He knows that many of us run away from love in general and his love in particular. Burning love from someone else can make us feel uncomfortable because we may not think we’re worthy of it, because we know that the only response to love is to love back and we fear we may not be capable of it. Love is meant to change us, to lift us up, and sometimes we don’t want to cooperate with that resurrection. Like St. Peter after the first miraculous catch of fish, we can cry out, “Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man.” That’s why Jesus gives us the imperative to abide in his love, to rest in it, to let it change us and become the defining characteristic of our life.
• But Jesus never gives us a task without providing the means. He tells us clearly how to remain in his love. “If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love.” We can’t remain in his love if we break the commandments, not because he’ll pull his love away from us — his love is everlasting and he’ll never retract it — but because the commandments all train how love to live in the love of God and in the love of neighbor. We see this truth readily in the Ten Commandments. We are not truly loving God if we’re worshipping other gods or giving into superstitions, if we’re abusing his holy name, or if we’re blowing him off on the Lord’s Day. We can’t be loving him in our neighbor whom he loves if we’re dishonoring the parents he gave us, hating or killing those he created, taking advantage of them out of lust, stealing from the goods he has given them, lying to them, or getting sad or envious over the personal or material blessings he has given them. All the law and the prophets, Jesus tells us, hang on the two-fold commandment of loving God and neighbor and that’s why we can’t remain in God’s love if we’re violating the love that is built into the commandments he has given. Jesus adds here that in telling us to remain in his love through keeping the commandments, he’s not asking of us anything he himself hasn’t done. He says, “Just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love.” Love, as Pope Benedict was accustomed to say, is idem velle, idem nolle, a Latin expression meaning willing and rejecting the same things as the Beloved. If we love God, we’re going to love what he loves. Jesus, in loving the Father, loved the Father’s will. Likewise, if we truly love the Lord and remain in his love, we’ll love what he loves and seek to do what he out of love wills for us and for others.
• But even after telling us how to remain in his love through keeping the commandments, he makes everything simpler still, telling us: “This is my commandment, love one another as I have loved you.” And he makes clear how he loves us and what real love leads to and is: It culminates in a total gift of ourselves for those whom we love. “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Jesus wants us to love one another to the point of giving of our lives for them, as he gave his life for us. While few of us will be required to die for others, when we’re willing to do so, then we’re much more willing to make the types of smaller sacrifices that are necessary for love to remain and grow: forgiving others, being patient with them, sacrificing some of our desires to help them fulfill their own, and so on. As Jesus says that the greatest love is to lay down one’s life for one’s friends, he immediately tells us, “You are my friends.” He calls us friends, he regards us as friends, because he has revealed to us everything he has heard from God the Father and has chosen and appointed us to go and bear fruit that will remain. And the way we reciprocate his love of friendship, is, he says, by doing what he commands, and laying down our life for him, our Friend, and for his friends.
• And so we see in these words of Jesus the whole pattern of the Christian life, which begins with grace, received in faith, overflowing in love. It begins, as St. John says, not with our love but with God’s love, who sent his Son to lay down his life for us. But then that love transforms us so that we are strengthened from within to love by that same standard. Jesus says, “Just as the Father loves me, so I love you,” and he wants to help us to say, “Just as Jesus loves me, so I love you,” treating others as friends with a willingness to sacrifice for them, to reveal to them what we have heard from God, to choose them whom God has chosen and to seek to bear fruit with them to eternal life.
• And the fruit of this entire experience of being loved by God and loving according to God’s measure is true Christian happiness. Jesus says, “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy might be complete.” The fruit of love is joy. We experience joy when we know how loved we are by God. We experience joy when we remain peacefully in that love without struggle. We experience joy when we share the love we have received with others and help them in turn learn the joy of being loved. We experience that joy even in great sacrifice made out of love for others, like we see in the stories of martyrs across the centuries, like the martyrs René, Isaac and Jean here, who were honored and willing to give their lives for the One who had given his life for theirs, for the ones for whom he had given his life, and out of witness to the love of God that conquers even death. The North American Martyrs teach us that what divine love can do in people just like us: it can make us strong in bearing witness to Him who his love and embolden us in love to live and to die in testimony to that great gift. No one has greater love, Jesus said, than to lay down his life for his friends, and René, Isaac and Jean showed that great friendship and love for the people right here, and for all of us who have come to the faith as a result of the crimson seeds they planted on this soil. They are our true friends and from heaven they love us still.
• The Lord knows that the standard of love to which he calls us is not easy. But every day at the altar he provides the means. No one has greater love than to lay down his life for his friends, and every day he gives us access to that very love and life. He says we are his friends if we do what he commands us and on the same night he gave us the words of today’s Gospel he told us, “Do this in memory of me.” In the Holy Eucharist, we receive the greatest act of love that the world has ever known, Jesus’ own self-giving love from the Upper Room and Calvary in expiation for our sins. It is in this love that we become capable of loving each other with the love of Christ. May the Lord through this Eucharist fill us with that love that knows no bounds, so that we, like the Martyrs, like St. Kateri, like Our Lady, like so many of our moms, may love him with all we’ve got and love others as he loves them. There is no greater love than the love we are about to receive. Let us abide in that love, and from the inside, learn from Jesus how to love in this greater way, by giving our body and blood out of love for him and for others.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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