Living The Lord’s Ever New Commandment, Fifth Friday of Easter, May 12, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the Fifth Week of Easter
Memorial of SS. Nereus and Achilleus, St. Pancras, St. Leopoldo Mandic, Blessed Alvaro del Portillo
May 12, 2023
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 and today he has focused 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, to hunger for it, to choose it, and tells us that 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. 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 wants us to be able to say to others in body language, “Just as God the Father loves Jesus and Jesus loves me, so I love you.” 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. Five 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, who teaches us today that there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for others and proved it on Calvary, tells us today that he has chosen us, he has given us the vocation, precisely to love in this way. “I have chosen you and appointed you to bear fruit, fruit that will last.” The fruit he is talking about are acts of Christ-like self-sacrificial love and the way we bear fruit is by attaching ourselves to Jesus the Vine, by uniting ourselves with him who is the Grain of Wheat as he falls to the ground in loving sacrifice (Jn 12:24). And 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 communion with Jesus’ salvific aims for us and others.
• Pope Benedict talks about this communion of love in his exhortation Deus Caritas Est. “Union with Christ is also union with all those to whom he gives himself. I cannot possess Christ just for myself; I can belong to him only in union with all those who have become, or who will become, his own. Communion draws me out of myself towards him, and thus also towards unity with all Christians. We become ‘one body,’ completely joined in a single existence. Love of God and love of neighbor are now truly united: God incarnate draws us all to himself. We can thus understand how agape also became a term for the Eucharist: there God’s own agape comes to us bodily, in order to continue his work in us and through us. Only by keeping in mind this Christological and sacramental basis can we correctly understand Jesus’ teaching on love. The transition that he makes from the Law and the Prophets to the twofold commandment of love of God and of neighbor, and his grounding the whole life of faith on this central precept, is not simply a matter of morality—something that could exist apart from and alongside faith in Christ and its sacramental re-actualization. Faith, worship and ethos are interwoven as a single reality that takes shape in our encounter with God’s agape. Here the usual contraposition between worship and ethics simply falls apart. ‘Worship’ itself, Eucharistic communion, includes the reality both of being loved and of loving others in turn. A Eucharist that does not pass over into the concrete practice of love is intrinsically fragmented. Conversely, … the ‘commandment’ of love is only possible because it is more than a requirement. Love can be ‘commanded’ because it has first been given.” Jesus loves us just as the Father loves him, and, filled with this love, he tells us to pay it forward.
• This communion in love is the proper way to understand today’s first reading as well. They weren’t going to concern the Gentile converts with all 613 precepts of the Old Covenant, but wanted them to be focused on the new commandment of the New Covenant. They gave them only three restrictions, “necessities,” each meant to help them remain in and share 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. They were “delighted with the exhortation” not because it wasn’t rigorist and demanding, but because it expressed the faith of the Church they had come to know, that the essence of our faith is letting God love us — “we are saved by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,” as Peter said yesterday; that grace is our participation in God’s life according to our nature as creatures; the essence of that divine life is love; and that love is supposed to transform us so that we will love God and others, through, with, in and like Christ.
• Today we celebrate five holy ones who show us how to enflesh this Gospel of love, this way to bear fruit through giving one’s life lovingly for God and others. SS. Nereus and Achilleus were brothers and Roman soldiers present at the execution of many of the Christians at the end of the first century. Eventually the prayers of the Christians and the grace of God helped them to recognize their sins, to convert, and to begin to convert others, until they were discovered as Christians and killed. St. Pancras was a 14 year old Roman convert during the persecution of Diocletian at the beginning of the fourth century. He was eventually brought before the authorities for being a Christian and given the chance to save his life by sacrificing to the pagan gods. He rejected their offer. Impressed by his pluck in resisting their threats, those in charge offered him wealth and power if he would sacrifice, but he refused again and was beheaded. We likewise celebrate St. Leopoldo Mandic today, one of those denominated by St. John Paul II as an extraordinary apostle of the confessional. There, as a martyr of the confessional for hours each day, he distributed God’s merciful love for them just like he himself had received. Finally, the Church also celebrates today the feast of Blessed Alvaro del Portillo, the closest collaborator and successor of St. Josemaria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei. Don Alvaro sought to show everyone how to live in the love of God with unity of life through one’s ordinary work, offering the work itself to God, loving others through the work done, and loving one’s collaborators.
• 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 so that we will 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: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download