Conditions for Receiving Jesus’ Unconditional Love, Fifth Monday of Easter, May 20, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the Fifth Week of Easter
Memorial of St. Bernardine of Siena
May 20, 2019
Acts 14:5-18, Ps 115, Jn 14:21-26

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today Jesus says something to us very surprising. He almost seems to make God’s love for us conditioned on our loving him first. “Whoever loves me” by keeping my commandments, Jesus says, “will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him.” Later, he reiterates, “Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him.” Is God’s love for us conditional in this way? The answer to the question is an emphatic no. St. John tells us in his first letter, “In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.” St. Paul tells us in his Letter to the Romans that God showed how much he loved us when we were absolutely not keeping his commandments. “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us (Rom 5:8). The Father never stops loving the loving his prodigal children. If Jesus called us to love our enemies, he was modeling us precisely on God’s love, who “makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust” (Mt 5:45).
• If God loves us unconditionally, if God loves us even before we keep his commandments and his word, then how do we understand today’s Gospel? Jesus is saying that we will experience the love of God far more when we open ourselves up to it precisely through receiving and reciprocating it, through overcoming our own self-centeredness and freely, willingly, and wholeheartedly sacrificing ourselves out of love for God, through trusting in him to keep his commandments and word that train us how to love like God loves and become more and more like God. Pope Francis likes to use the analogy of the human heart with its systolic and diastolic functions: if it’s not pumping out blood, it’s dead and incapable of receiving blood within. So if our heart is hardened toward the love of God and neighbor, which is the two-fold principle on the basis of which everything in the law and prophets depends (Mt 22:40), then we cannot receive the constant and unconditional love of God. Pope Benedict used to say, love is idem volle, idem nolle, wanting the same things and rejecting the same things. The more we want what God wants and reject what God rejects, the more we will open ourselves up to receive the full outpouring of his love.
• What do we need to grow in this capacity to love God and receive the love he has for us from before the foundation of the world? Today we can focus on three things.
• The first is the humility that makes us love God more than we love ourselves and seek God’s glory rather than our own. After the healing of the crippled man in Lystra, the people began to treat Paul and Barnabas as Hermes and Zeus respectively and wanted to sacrifice animals to them as if they were incarnate gods rather than emissaries of the Word-made-flesh. It would have been somewhat tempting for the two of them, after the sufferings of walking through the swamps of Perga and Pamphylia and ascending the dangerous cliff to Antioch in Pisidia, after they had been driven out of Antioch in Pisidia and Iconium, for them to have basked for a little while in people who were so grateful they were divinizing them. But Paul and Barnabas were coming not to get adulation but to help people love and adore the one true God. “Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give the glory!,” we prayed in the Psalm, and that’s what they lived. They immediately sought to help bring the people to open themselves up to the greater love of God than they had experienced up until then through “heaven and earth and sea and all that is in them,” through the “rains from heaven and fruitful seasons,” through the “nourishment and gladness for your hearts.” But as we’ll see tomorrow, most of the people of Lystra didn’t really want to keep the Lord’s commandments, to live by his word, and enter into the way he wanted to love them. They wanted to adore gods of their own making. And when Paul and Barnabas, despite the miracle they had just worked, insistently called them through that miracle to worship the God who had accomplished it through them, they would rise up and kill Paul, stoning him to death, as we’ll see in tomorrow’s first reading, until the first Christians through their prayer raised him from the dead. The Lystrians didn’t have the humility to worship God as God wanted to be adored, they didn’t want to enter into the love of the Covenant on God’s terms. Paul and Barnabas were humble enough to do so, however, because they didn’t want to be gods but to glorify God through their own decrease so that He might increase.
• The second thing we need is suffering, which prunes us to love God more. On Wednesday, we will hear Jesus’ giving us the Parable of the Vine and the Branches. Jesus says about his Father, “He takes away every branch in me that does not bear fruit, and every one that does he prunes so that it bears more fruit.” We see how God was pruning Saints Paul and Barnabas today. St. Luke tells us in the Acts of the Apostles, “There was an attempt in Iconium by both the Gentiles and the Jews, together with their leaders, to attack and stone Paul and Barnabas.” We see earlier in Acts that they were likewise run out of Antioch in Pisidia. Tomorrow we’ll see that the very same people who were trying to sacrifice oxen for them will stone Paul to death before the nascent Church there surrounded up and prayed for his resuscitation. In all of these sufferings and contradictions, God was helping them better to live in his love. Jesus tomorrow will describe even his own sufferings, his own pruning, that would happen to him on Good Friday as a means to show the world  that “I love the Father and that I do just as the Father has commanded me.” Our vicissitudes are an opportunity for us to live entirely on the love of God and for the love of God, by doing his will even when it’s hard and thereby giving a tremendous example of love for the world. We grow in love that way.
• The third means we have to grow is by cooperating with the gift of the Holy Spirit, God’s love poured into our heart (Rom 5:5). Jesus tells us at the end of today’s Gospel, “The Advocate, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name he will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you.” The Holy Spirit will teach us how to receive God’s love by helping us to remember what Jesus taught and put it into practice with passion, will help us to love God and our neighbor with all our mind, heart, soul and strength. He was the great teacher of Saints Paul and Barnabas, the instructor of the martyrs, the guide of virgins, and the source of courage, love and peace in every age. He opens us to receive the love of God and to reciprocate it as much loved sons and daughters. He helps us to remain in God’s love as Jesus will command us later in the week. Today the Church celebrates the feast of someone who was filled with the spirit and helped the Church learn how to accept and live by the love of God. Today in the Opening Prayer of the Mass, we asked God the Father that, like St. Bernardine, we “may ever be set aflame with the spirit of your love.” That is a reference to the personal love between Father and Son who is the Holy Spirit. St. Bernardine himself was distinguished by this fire. He is one of the most famous preachers in the history of the Church. He had a tongue of fire as he preached against many of the vices of the day — usury, gambling, sodomy — and that did not ingratiate him to the people enslaved by those vices. But he mostly preached about Jesus. To help overcome the divisions led by the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict, in which both like gang members in the Cripps and Bloods today sought to proclaim their allegiance in markers, he wanted Christians to have their own, and so he made it, the trigrammaton, IHS, which are the first three consonants in Greek of the name Jesus and an acronym in Latin for Iesus Hominum Salvator, Jesus Savior of Men. In promoting devotion to Jesus’ holy name, he was actually accused of heresy and summoned to Rome, but after the Pope heard him preach, he was asked by him to give a mission that lasted 80 days to help Roman Catholics come to deeper faith in the power of Jesus’ name and person and to help people appreciate the unconditional love contained in the name that in Hebrew means “God saves.” God so loved the world that he sent his Son so that we might not perish but be saved and have eternal life.
• When St. Bernardine would preach his long missions, he would do so at dawn. As we begin our day at down here at Mass, we ask through his intercession that we ignited with the fire of the Holy Spirit, so that with humility and through suffering, we may grow in our experience of God’s unconditional love for us and have that love overflow into unconditional love for others. It’s here at Mass, we know, that we hear God’s word and observe his commandment to “do this in memory of him,” not merely bringing into time Christ’s eternal sacrifice from the Upper Room and Calvary, but humbly sacrificing ourselves along with Christ. And as we do this, we open ourselves up to receive God’s response, as Father and Son — and with them the Holy Spirit — come to make their dwelling place within us, so that we, like St. Bernardine, may live in Holy Communion with them and with each other.

The readings for today’s Mass were: