Following the Lord Along the Path of Bold Sacrificial Love, Seventh Friday of Easter, May 26, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the Seventh Week of Easter
Memorial of St. Philip Neri
May 26, 2023
Acts 25:13-21, Ps 103, Jn 21:15-19

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today we have one of the most powerful and poignant scenes in the Gospel, which the Church gives us to help us to summarize the graces of the Easter Season and to send us forward into Pentecost and beyond. It’s a continuation, in a sense, of the Easter Octave, since it’s the second half of the Gospel we had on Easter Friday, April 14. Jesus meets Peter and six other disciples on the seashore of Galilee where he cooks them breakfast. At the end of the meal, he takes Simon Peter aside in order to restore his confidence after having totally denied Jesus three times on Holy Thursday just a couple of hours after saying that even if he should have to die for Jesus, he would never betray him. Peter was not yet able to experience the joy of Jesus’ resurrection fully because of the trauma of his sins. But Jesus needed him. Jesus wanted to solidify the rock on whom he was building his Church. So in response to Peter’s three-fold denial, Jesus gave him a chance to make a three-fold affirmation of love.
• Buried within their dialogue is a real drama, but to see it, we have to know a little Greek. The first time Jesus asks Peter if he loves him, the word he uses for love is agape, which means a total self-sacrificial type of love, the type of love Jesus himself showed when he said, “No one has any greater love than to lay down his life for his friends.” “Simon, son of John,” he was asking, “do you love me with agape?” Peter’s response, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you,” doesn’t use the word “agape,” but rather “philia.” He replies, in other words, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you as a friend.” Peter, after having broken his promise to die for Jesus before he ever would deny him, wasn’t going to make the same promise again. He was still carrying around the weight of his betrayal. Jesus had called him a friend during the Last Supper because he had revealed to him and the other apostles all that the Father had told him, but Peter had been stripped of the confidence that had made him commit to love Jesus by Jesus’ life-giving standard, that the greatest love is to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. So Jesus asked him a second time, “Peter, do you love me with agape, with total self-sacrificial love?” Peter replied again, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you with philia, as a friend.” So Jesus in the third question lowered himself to where Peter was comfortable and asked, “Simon, Son of John, do you love me with philia?” That’s when Peter was distressed. He knew the Lord was calling him to more but the Lord was acknowledging that Peter didn’t think he was capable of heroic love. He replied, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you as a friend.” Jesus, however, wasn’t going to leave Peter there. He said to him that when he was younger, he used to dress himself and go about as he pleased. But when Peter would grow old, another would “stretch out his hands” — a Greek euphemism for crucifixion — and lead him to a place he didn’t want to go, something, St. John said, was indicating the type of death by which Peter would glorify God. Jesus was telling him, “Even if you don’t want to say again publicly that you love me enough to die for me, you will love me that way, even being crucified for me.” And Jesus, to emphasize the point said to him, “Follow me,” because Peter would follow him all the way.
• What’s the lesson for us? Each of us, too, has had times when we haven’t been faithful to God, but no matter what our falls, Jesus wants to restore us to be capable of a love like his, of a total self-giving love in response to Jesus’ love for us. And he indicates to Peter and to us how to show it, by feeding his lambs and sheep, by tending his flock. In other words, the way we will demonstrate our love for Jesus will be by sacrificing ourselves, by giving of ourselves, out of love for those he loved so much to die for. Jesus didn’t say, “Love me as I have loved you,” but “Love one another as I have loved you,” because our love for him would be shown in our love for his flock.
• St. Paul, who was on trial in today’s first reading because of his love for Jesus and for Jesus’ sheep and lambs, wrote to the Corinthians of the importance of this type of agape. He said that if we have faith to move mountains, if we even give our bodies over to the torturers in defense of the faith but don’t have love, we are just a noisy gong and a clashing cymbal. To love by Jesus’ standard isn’t easy and Jesus knows it. St. Peter himself learned it the hard way. St. Paul gave his words to the Corinthians out of experience because he himself needed to learn each of the virtues he would predicate of love: “Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, it is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.” Christ’s love transformed both of them.
• Jesus gives us two gifts to love by his standard. The first is the gift of himself in the Holy Eucharist. Jesus himself enters us with his own love so that from the inside we are able to love others with the total gift of ourselves in communion with him. He who says to us with love, “This is my Body given for you, this is the Chalice of my Blood poured out for you,” strengthens us from within to echo in our own lives his words, so that we may give our body, our soul, our sweat, our lives loving others with the same love we here receive. The second gift is the one we’re preparing to receive anew on Sunday, the feast of Pentecost. The Holy Spirit came down upon Peter, the Apostles, Mary and the members of the early Church as tongues of fire, so that with ardent love they might give witness to the faith. One of his great gifts is the gift of courage; one of the great fruits of life according to the Holy Spirit is agape. The Holy Spirit changed Peter from an apostate to an apostle, from a chicken to a shepherd. He upgraded his love from philia to agape and strengthened him by the gift of courage to remain faithful. And the Holy Spirit seeks to work the same moral miracle in us.
• We see the impact of life according to the Holy Spirit in the life of the saint we celebrate day. When the future St. Philip Neri arrived in Rome in 1533 as an 18-year-old layman, he got a job as a tutor of two young boys that provided a room as well as a daily fare of bread, water and few olives. Philip spent most of his time in prayer and study, trying to conform his life to the Lord’s. He begged God to give him what he needed. God didn’t let him down. On the vigil of Pentecost in 1544, when he was 28, as he was in the catacombs imploring the Holy Spirit to give him the fruits of the Spirit (Gal 5:22-23), he saw the third person of the Trinity take on the appearance of a ball of fire that entered his mouth, descend to his heart and cause an explosion of heat and love that an autopsy later demonstrated had broken outward two of his ribs and almost doubled the size of his heart. St. Paul once wrote to the Romans, “The love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us,” and that was literally true for St. Philip. For the rest of his life, the fire of love burned both spiritually and physically, so that no matter how cold it was outside he needed to have the windows open. People could hear his heart beating across Churches. He became a living example of each of the fruits of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-mastery. His docility to what God the Holy Spirit wanted to do in and through him not only led to his becoming one of the greatest saints of all time but also to his helping vast multitudes respond to the sanctifying work of the same Holy Spirit. In the Collect beginning this Mass we begged for the same miraculous transformation: “O God, who never cease to bestow the glory of holiness on the faithful servants you raise up for yourself, graciously grant that the Holy Spirit may kindle in us that fire with which he wonderfully filled the heart of St. Philip Neri.” We’re asking for a heart transplant, so that we might live with a heart full of fiery agape like St. Philip’s.
• And Philip started a revolution of love in Rome after a time of great devastation. Most of the people were still in trauma from Charles V’s brutal ransacking of the city in 1527. The Renaissance had led to the rediscovery of much of pagan literature and with it, the intellectual and cultured classes had readopted pagan rituals and practices. The Church was in almost total disarray. Several of the Renaissance popes lived more in disgrace than grace. Cardinals were appointed not because of their holiness or sacred leadership but because of their bank accounts and bloodlines. Many pastors, desiring to live leisurely, subcontracted the care of souls to those who were unfit. The challenges that confronted Philip would make the serious issues we face today seem comparatively almost idyllic. Yet, through Philip the Holy Spirit ignited such a fire of love that by Philip’s death in 1595, this vast metropolis had, to a large degree, returned not just to the practice of the faith but to fervent, joy-filled practice of the faith working through love. What did St. Philip do to help turn it around? How did he seek to glorify God? He did so by inspiring and calling people to good deeds. Philip would go up to people on the streets, joke and laugh with them, win them over by his jovial goodness and ask, “Brothers, when are we going to start to do good?” He invited his new friends to help him in caring for the sick. They would volunteer each day as orderlies in hospitals, cleaning and changing patients, feeding them, and often preparing them for death. Medical care and sanitation are still problems in Italian public hospitals today; they were little more than germ factories in the 16th century. Philip and his friends, however, brought the Good Samaritan’s love to those whom few in society were willing to care for. They humbly fought not just for the towel but for the bedpans! And that started to transform all those who did it, and they saw the fruit of joy that comes from sincere loving.
• Today at Mass Jesus calls each of us by name like he called Simon Peter, Paul, and Philip, and asks, “Do you love me?” He gives his here his agapic love and tells us to “do this” in his memory. Our love for him is shown by receiving his gift and then, together with him, impelled by the Holy Spirit, to tend and feed his sheep and lambs. So great was St. Philip’s understanding of and love for the Mass that whenever he began to think about it, he would go into ecstasy and even, some said, would levitate. His double-size heart would become like a hot-air balloon lifting him up toward God. For that reason, in preparation for Mass, he would have read to him joke or comic books to keep him from not entering into ecstatic prayer. Later on in life, when he was no longer able to celebrate public Masses, the server would extinguish the candles after the consecration of the Precious Blood and come back two hours later, light the candles, pull on Philip’s chasuble and help him finish the Mass. Through the Mass the Holy Spirit poured into his heart, his mouth, his stomach and his whole body and soul the love of God, and the Holy Spirit wants to do the same in us. May each of us today, strengthened by the Holy Spirit, reply to Jesus’ ever present question by saying in Holy Communion,  “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you with a total self-sacrificial gift of love,” and live it by the way we, like Peter, Paul and Philip, love the lambs and sheep he entrusts to our shepherdly care.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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