Hearing Anew the Most Important Words of All Time, Fifth Thursday of Easter, May 2, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, New York, NY
Thursday of the Fifth Week of Easter
Memorial of St. Athanasius, Bishop and Doctor of the Church
May 2, 2024
Act 15: 7-21, Ps 96, Jn 15:9-11

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today in the Gospel Jesus says what I believe are the most important words in the history of the world. We will hear them again on Sunday. These words are important whenever anyone says them, but the fact that God himself said them in the way that he said them, and then put them into his own body language, makes them the most life-changing phrase ever: “I love you,” he tells us. We need to stop and ponder the reality of those words! “I love you.” But then Jesus puts them into a context that ought to astound us: “Just as the Father loves me, I love you.” The Father loves him perfectly, profoundly and intimately — and Jesus tells us that he loves us in that same way. And he doesn’t merely love us “all” in that way, but he loves each of us in that way, as St. Paul wrote in his letter to the Galatians, “He loved me and gave his life for me” (Gal 2:20).
• Grasping this reality is essential not only for the Christian life but for human life. “Man cannot live without love,” St. John Paul II wrote in his first encyclical Redemptor Hominis. “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” (RH 10). This is true for love in general. We need the love of family, the love of friends, the spousal love of a husband or wife (either human or mystical), the total self-giving love of someone who values us that much. Without it, we’re lost. Many people who don’t experience this love spend their lives looking for it in places they won’t find it. If they haven’t experienced the love of a mom or dad, they often get themselves into trouble seeking that love in relationships that will never truly substitute. If they’ve suffered violence in relationships that should have been loving, often they’ll get involved in lifestyles that will try to reconstruct the love that should have been present in the first place. But it is also true in terms of divine love. There are many people — including many Catholics — who have never really experienced the love of the Lord. Their notion of God is perhaps an angry God, or a distant, negligent God, or a God who is a stern taskmaster making sure they fulfill all their duties lest they be punished, or even an indulgent God who doesn’t care about them enough to concern himself with their self-destructive choices. They haven’t experienced a loving God. Many people are filled with a type of self-pity or self-hatred because they have never experienced God’s love and often don’t believe they are lovable by God or anyone else, that they can never please him, that they’re constantly letting him, themselves and everyone else down. Today Jesus says to them, and to all of us, “I love you … just as my Father loves me!” And he shows them how much he loves them by telling them that he will lay down his life for them out of agapic philia, which we would have had in tomorrow’s continuation of today’s Gospel if it were not the feast of the apostles Philip and James: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” He will love them to the extreme of his self-giving.
• After Jesus says the most important words in history he then gives us the most important command of the Christian life. “Remain in my love.” As much as he loves us, he knows that many of us run away from that love. That type of burning love can make us uncomfortable because we don’t think we’re worthy of it, because we don’t want to let God down. We know that that love is meant to change us, to lift us up, and many times we don’t want to cooperate with that resurrection. One of the things that we see in life is that when people think they’re less than they are, often they begin to sink to their self-identity so that they can “prove” to others that they’re as “bad” as they believe they are. We can also do that spiritually. We can flee from God’s love because it’s too much for us. 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.
• Third, he tells us how to remain in that 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 pull away — but because the commandments are all about living in the love of God and the love of neighbor that flows from living in the love of God. We can’t love God if we’re worshipping other gods or giving into superstitions, if we’re abusing his holy name, if we’re blowing him off on the Lord’s day. We can’t be loving him in those 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 gave them, lying to them, or getting envious over the blessings of human love he has given them or of material blessings. 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 his love if we’re violating the love that is contained in the commandments God has given. In this condition to remaining in his love, however, Jesus is leading by example. He never says merely “Do what I say!” but always, “Follow me!,” and he does so in this circumstance as well. After telling us that to remain in his love we need to keep his commandments, he adds, “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, 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 we loves and seek to do what he out of love wills for us and others.
• And then Jesus tells us what remaining in his love leads to: “I have told you this so that my joy might be in you and your joy might be complete.” The fruit of love is joy. We see this all the time when people fall in love. Being loved and loving others in return changes people for the better. They recognize how good life is. You can’t wipe the smile from their faces. I used to enjoy seeing this dramatic transformation in high school students when I was a chaplain at Bishop Connolly High School in Fall River. Love changes us. Love fills us with joy. I rejoice to see it in young couples preparing for marriage, as well as in older couples who have rekindled their first love.
• But that type of love we see in human relationships is supposed to be even more evident in our life of faith. Jesus has told us of his undying love for us and of the Father’s love for him so that we might have his joy in us and so that our joy may be perfected. The first thing to note here is that Jesus was full of joy! Many times our image of Jesus doesn’t have him smiling. We can project onto him our own seriousness. But Jesus was the most joyful human being who ever lived! He was joyful because he lived in the Father’s love. His joy in his public ministry attracted people to leave their livelihoods and follow him, because they wanted that joy. His joy was doubtless even more radiant after his resurrection, when he was able to show others the reason for a joy that the world couldn’t give or rob. And Jesus wants us to have that joy! If we experience his love, we will have that joy! The reality, however, is that many Christians don’t live with this joy. Pope Francis has said that joy is meant to be the “sign of a Christian” and therefore, “a Christian without joy is either not a Christian or is sick.… A healthy Christian is a joyful Christian.” He’s calling us all to live our faith with the joy that flows from the Gospel, the joy that flows from knowing we’re loved by God to the point of suffering crucifixion, the joy that’s been raised from the dead and can’t therefore be extinguished. This is a joy that isn’t lost but in fact is intensified in suffering. We see that in the stories of the martyrs who were singing hymns on the road to execution as if they were proceeding to a wedding. And once Christians start living with that type of joy, others will be busting down the doors to experience that same joy. That’s the way we’re called to spread the Gospel, so that they might follow the trail of our joy to the Source of that joy in the love Jesus has for us and has for them.
• We see an application of this love in today’s first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, which concerns the deliberations of the Council of Jerusalem about what to do with Gentile Christians. The point of their conversation was so that the Gentile Christians would enter into and experience the love of God, rather than feel perpetually under the weight of the law, of the 613 commandments of the Old Testament, many of which were preparatory so that the Jews could receive the love of God and pass it on, but many of which also had become idols rather than means. St. Peter stood up and said two things that are really important for us to grasp. The first is that we are “saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus in the same way as they,” reminding them of what God had done for the family of Cornelius the centurion when St. Peter had baptized the whole family. We are saved by the unmerited love of God, who loved us so much that he sent his own Son so that we might not perish but have eternal life. We’re not saved by the “yoke” of all the precepts of the law —  in other words by our own actions, “that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear.” The second truth is that to put that yoke or burden on the shoulders of the disciples would be tantamount to “putting God to the test,” to not living in God’s love, since he has obviously accepted them through what Peter testified about the way the Gentiles were accepted and what Paul and Barnabas were themselves saying. Peter’s words, inspired by the Holy Spirit, held the day. St. James, who had a tremendous reputation among the Judaizing Christians and among the strictest Jews in general for his fasting, prayer and rigorous observance of the Mosaic law fulfilled in Jesus, spoke about how the prophets had foretold that the Lord would bring about that “the rest of humanity may seek out the Lord, even all the Gentiles on whom my name is invoked.” He therefore said that they should accept the Gentiles as God has, but put three conditions on them that are consistent with living in the love of the Lord. They counteract three things that can prevent our remaining in God’s love.
  • The first was pride. That’s why he said they should not eat the “meat of strangled animals and blood.” The entire Old Testament was meant essentially to teach the Jews that they were not God. One of the ways God helped them to realize this was by the way he had them prepare food. Blood was the sign of life — if there’s blood flowing in an animal, the animal is alive. To consume an animal with the blood still in it was to play, to some degree, the part of God. So God commanded in the Old Covenant that the animal should be killed in such a way that all the blood would be drained out of it before the Jews would try to prepare the animal for a meal. That way they were not tempted to play the Lord of life and death over animals, but only to eat animals in which there was clearly no life — no blood — left. God would surpass this dietary restriction and pronounce all foods clean in a dream St. Peter would have, but St. James recognized that Jewish and Gentile Christians would never be able to have the communion of shared meals if the Gentiles were eating the meat from strangled animals, because it would be jarring to them as if the Gentiles were playing God.
  • The second was to the failure to love one’s neighbor. This is in the background of the command to “avoid pollution from idols.” That wasn’t just idolatry, but from eating the meat sacrificed to idols. In the pagan temples, when a cow for example was sacrificed, a little of the meat would be burned, some would be given to the pagan priests, but most would be returned to the family for a feast in which they would offer themselves to the pagan gods. Jews had always been particularly sensitive to this type of participation in idolatrous sacrifices and Jews and Gentiles would never be able to eat together if the Gentiles were insensitively communing with pagan sacrifices in this way.
  • Finally, it was preventing their own love from being corrupted. That’s why he commanded that they should avoid “porneia,” meaning all sexual sin. They would not be remaining in the love of the Lord if they were lusting after others.
• When Judas and Silas, Paul and Barnabas, announced the decision to the Gentile Christians in Antioch (which ordinarily we would have seen tomorrow if we didn’t have the proper feasts of SS. Philip and James), there was great rejoicing, the joy that flows from living in the salvation that Christ has given by his grace, by living in his love that was very much alive in the Christian community.
• Today the Church celebrates the feast of St. Athanasius, the great and intrepid saintly fourth-century doctor of the Church who as a young deacon was an enormously important figure in the Council of Nicaea and perhaps the greatest figure in defending its core teaching about Jesus Christ, who as the incarnate God is incarnate Love because God is love. In a 2007 catechesis, Pope Benedict summarized St. Anthasius’ life by saying, “The fundamental idea of Athanasius’ [life] was precisely that God is accessible. … It is through our communion with Christ that we can truly be united to God. He has really become ‘God-with-us.’” In Christ God is accessible and his love is made tangible. We might take that thought for granted today, but during Athanasius’ life it was not universally acknowledged. As a young boy born during the time of ferocious anti-Christian persecutions, he learned the Gospel of the Lord from heroic, confessor priests. He went as a young deacon to assist the Patriarch of Alexandria (Egypt) at the Council of Nicaea in 325. This was the second Ecumenical Council after the Council of Jerusalem, and was called 12 years after the legalization of Christianity, to deal with the teachings of an Egyptian priest Arius who was claiming that Jesus, as Pope Benedict summarized the position, “was not a true God but a created God, a creature ‘halfway’ between God and man who hence remained for ever inaccessible to us.” God had not really become man in the Incarnation. The brilliant deacon Athanasius helped lead the charge against Arius’ teaching, which he persuaded the Council to condemn, and it was largely out of his work that we have the Nicene Creed we proclaim every Sunday. But even though the Arians lost, their false theological ideas were not extinguished. Over the course of time, Arians, those who didn’t believe Jesus was 100 percent God and 100 percent man, gained the upper hand in civil and Church politics. Various bishops and priests were Arians as were some emperors. For that reason, St. Athanasius was persecuted, multiply exiled, and had to suffer a great deal. Five different times he was banished from his see by command of the emperor. 17 of his 45 years as Patriarch of Alexandria he spent in exile. But the incarnation he taught he also lived and he knew that Jesus was with him in his risen and transfigured Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. Athanasius taught that the Word of God “was made man so that we might be made God,” and he sought through all of his priestly work to bring about that sanctification. And that focus on the presence of the love of God in the incarnate God of love filled him with love and with joy in the midst of all he endured for the Gospel.
• Jesus told us these words, “I love you … just as the Father loves me,” on Holy Thursday. And it’s at Mass, at our daily participation in what he began in the Upper Room, that Jesus not only says those words but puts them into body language. As he says in the continuation of this Gospel, no one has greater love than to lay down his life for his friends, and Jesus gives his life for us — his body, blood, soul and divinity — here in the Eucharist, which is our participation in time in his one eternal sacrifice in the Upper Room and on the Cross on Calvary to save us. This is the way he loves us each day. By receiving this love and remaining in it, we are filled with God, strengthened to keep his commandments, and ought to be filled with joy. The most joyful man who ever lived comes to live within us. That joy should fill us with contagious excitement to participate in Mass and move us to bring that joy out to a world that in many places of which that joy is absent. This is the joy of the Gospel we receive and are called to radiate. May we today bring this deep Christian joy that flows from our remaining in Jesus’ life-giving love to all we’ll meet today!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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