Living in the Love of God, Fifth Monday of Easter, May 5, 2015

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, New York, NY
Monday of the Fifth Week of Easter
May 4, 2015
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. 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. “For Christ, while we were still helpless, died at the appointed time for the ungodly. Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person, though perhaps for a good person one might even find courage to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us (Rom 5:7-8). 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.”
• 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. As Pope Benedict used to say, love if 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? In the first reading, we see two things we need.
• The first is the humility that makes us 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 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. Paul and Barnabas were humble enough to do so, however, because they didn’t want to be God but to glorify God through their own decrease so that He might increase.
• The second thing we need is pruning. We talked about this yesterday in 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 saw last week 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.
• How do we do this, though? To love like this is obviously easier said than done. We do this by the power of the Holy Spirit. 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 do it. 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. Over the course of these next almost three weeks until Pentecost, we ought to be calling on him more and more.
• The lessons the Lord teaches us today find their culmination in the Holy Eucharist. It’s here 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 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 may live in Holy Communion with them and with each other.

The readings for today’s Mass were: