Growing in Christ’s Love, Fifth Friday of Easter, May 15, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Friday of the Fifth Week of Easter
Memorial of St. Isidore, Farmer
May 15, 2020
Acts 15:22-31, Ps 57, Jn 15:12-17

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Throughout this 15th chapter of St. John’s Gospel, recounting what Jesus said during the Last Supper, Jesus has been focusing on the type of communion he came into the world to bring about, communion with him and with others. He began with the image of the Vine and the Branches. Yesterday on the Feast of St. Matthias, we were fortunate enough by God’s providence to have the same Gospel that in the Fifth Week of Easter we have on Thursday and Friday, and so it gives us a double opportunity to focus on how that ontological union with him (brought about by the sacraments) is meant to lead into a moral union, a union based on communion in his love.
• Yesterday he said the most important words ever uttered, that just as God the Father loves him, so he loves each of us individually. He calls us to remain in that love, not to run away from it, to hunger for it, to choose it, and tells us the means by which we will is through keeping his commandments, the commandments that precisely train us to love God and love others. All the law and the prophets, all the commandments in other words, hang on the two-fold imperative to love God with all we are and to love our neighbor as ourselves (Mt 22:40). And he tells us that remaining in his love in this way is the path to true and unending happiness, so that Jesus’ joy may be in us and our joy complete.
• Today he specifies more clearly what his commandment is in which we are supposed to abide. He gives us “his” commandment, which he also calls “new.” It’s the summary of the Christian moral life. “This is my commandment: love one another as I have loved you.” Jesus loves us, he told us yesterday, as much as the Father loves him, which is a total, self-sacrificial love to the extreme. Jesus didn’t call us to love him as he loved us, but to love others at the level of total self-sacrificial love. Jesus teaches us this same truth after the resurrection when he gives St. Peter three times to reconstitute his fidelity after his three fold denial. Jesus asks three times whether he loves him more than everything else and three times Peter replies that he does. Jesus, in response to each, doesn’t stop there in mutual love. He says, “Feed my sheep.” “Feed my lambs.” “Tend my sheep.” Peter’s love for Jesus would be shown in how he cares for those Christ has entrusted to him, both old (sheep) as well as young or vulnerable (lambs). And Jesus told Peter, using a euphemism for crucifixion, that when he would grow old, he would love the Lord and others in imitation of Christ. It’s the same way with all of us. Our love for the Lord will be shown by our love for others and not just by any old feelings of sympathy, but by our willingness to give our lives for others, which begins with giving our time, using our talents, and willingly putting others’ lives above our own. A few years ago, when this Gospel came up at daily Mass, Pope Francis made this point: “Jesus says something remarkable to us: ‘Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’ Love always takes this path: to give one’s life. To live life as a gift, a gift to be given — not a treasure to be stored away. And Jesus lived it in this manner, as a gift. … We must not burn out life with selfishness.”
• Jesus also describes other characteristics of true agape, the love he has for us and we’re supposed to have for others. It leads to friendship. When two people do what pleases the other out of love, how can it not lead to this type of genuine philia (true love of friends as a second self)? Jesus tells us that when we are friends with him, he will be able to reveal to us everything he has heard from his Father, because without that loving bond, we wouldn’t be able to receive it. Jesus, moreover, tells us his agape will be fruitful. Our love with him is meant to overflow into acts of love for others. He tells us that we have the vocation to this: “I have chosen you and appointed you to bear fruit, fruit that will last.” The way we bear fruit is, as we heard on Wednesday, by attaching ourselves to Jesus the Vine, or as Jesus told us elsewhere, by uniting ourselves with him who is the Grain of Wheat as he falls to the ground in loving sacrifice (Jn 12:24). And this leads to the last characteristic of love he specifies: once we’re united in this way, we’re able to ask God the Father for anything and he’ll do it, because we will not be praying things apart from God and his will, but asking precisely in a total loving communion with Jesus’ salvific aims for us and others.
• So the whole teaching Jesus gives us in John 15 about divine love is: The Father loves the Son with a perfect love; the Son loves each of us with that same love; he calls us to remain in that love, to abide in it, to bask in it; he tells us we will when we keep his commandment to love others as he has loved us; this love leads to true friendship; this love overflows; this love leads to common prayer that will last forever.
• This communion in love is the proper way to understand today’s first reading as well. Led by the Holy Spirit, the apostles in Jerusalem weren’t going to have the Gentile converts focus on all 613 precepts of the Old Covenant, but wanted them to be concentrate on the new commandment of the New Covenant. They gave them only three restrictions, each meant to help them remain in God’s love: to abstain from meat sacrificed to idols so that they wouldn’t scandalize others, which would be contrary to love of neighbor; from blood, which was a sign of life and take the place of God as Lord of life, which would again be a scandal and a lack of reverence for God; and from porneia, which is far more than unlawful marriage, but all sexual sin, which corrupts our capacity to love like God when we become takers rather than givers, consumers rather than servants, predators rather than protectors.
• Someone who shows us how to respond to receive, remain in and share Christ’s love by laying down one’s life for others, who was a friend of God, prayed together with Jesus and bore tremendous fruit in daily life is the saint the Church celebrates today: St. Isidore the Farmer, the patron saint of those who till the soil and the efforts of the Church to proclaim the Gospel out in the countrysides. He died in 1130, famous for the way he sanctified his work, humbly seeking to glorify God through his labor, something for which he suffered a great deal from the hands of his fellow field laborers. St. Isidore began his day with prayer and Mass receiving Christ’s love and then seeking to make his life Eucharistic by “doing this” in his memory throughout the rest of his day. He turned the fields into a sanctuary, praying while he worked. Many were inspired by him, but he, too, was opposed. Once when his fellow laborers got tired of his getting to work after Mass, even though he would work longer than they and be more productive, his boss came to investigate. He saw, somewhat miraculously, that Isidore’s guardian angel was plowing right beside him. Isidore knew he wasn’t working alone. He teaches us all something very important. Not only do we accomplish far more in our work when we seek to unite it to the Lord, but we also are able through our work to love others not just in serving them but in bringing them toward God, both through our explicit conversations, invitations and example, but also through the way we work differently from all the rest, treating our work as a divine encounter rather than simply a toilsome means to earn a paycheck. Isidore worked in the love of God and for the love of God. Insofar as we spend at least a third of each day working — sometimes much more — the more we can turn our work into a collaborative effort with God, the more we open ourselves up to the presence of God who loves us constantly, whose light guides us, whose words echo within us, whose salvation is ever before us, the more we will receive God’s love and have it impact our work and our fellow workers. We can also remember St. Isidore today, on this International Day of the Family, for his marriage to St. Mary of the Head (Santa Maria de la Cabeza), which has been a model for nine centuries of how spouses are meant to help each other grow in holiness and how the family is meant to be an image of God through becoming truly a loving communion of persons, patterning their very marriage after the love of God, receiving it, remaining in it, and laying down their lives for each other in fruitful, prayerful friendship.
• Today as we prepare to receive Jesus in Holy Communion, as he lays down his life for us as our food and tells us to do this in memory of him, we ask him — with the confidence that whatever we ask the Father in his name he’ll give us if we bear the fruit that will remain — to help us do what he commands, to love so that we might become living commentaries of “his” commandment, which is the means by which we will grow in the image of God who is love outpoured.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel JN 15:12-17

Jesus said to his disciples:
“This is my commandment: love one another as I love you.
No one has greater love than this,
to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
You are my friends if you do what I command you.
I no longer call you slaves,
because a slave does not know what his master is doing.
I have called you friends,
because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.
It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you
and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain,
so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you.
This I command you: love one another.”