Remaining in Jesus’ Love, Sixth Sunday of Easter (B), May 5, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx
Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year B
May 5, 2024
Acts 10:25-26.34-35.44-48, Ps 98, 1 Jn 4:7-10, Jn 15:9-17

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• Today in the Gospel Jesus says what I believe are the most important words in the history of the world. 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.” We know that God the Father cannot possibly love God the Son more perfectly, or deeply, or better than he does. He eternally loves Jesus with all he is, giving him everything except what it means to be Father. And Jesus is saying that he loves us just as much, just as profoundly, just as completely as God the Father loves him. This is the true foundation of the Christian life, to live in the love of God. God the Father so loved us that he gave his only Son so that we might not perish but have eternal life. God the Son loved us by freely and lovingly giving that life in order to save ours. God the Holy Spirit is that love between the Father and the Son and hence, since Jesus loves us like the Father loves him, the Holy Spirit is, by application, mysteriously the love between Jesus and us, and is sent down upon us like he came down upon Cornelius and his household in today’s first reading. Since as St. John tells us in the epistle, “God is love,” God wishes to bring us into his interpersonal, Trinitarian communion of love, and that’s what Jesus’ and the Holy Spirit’s missions seek to achieve.
• We all know how being loved can turn someone’s life right side up. I remember when I was a high school chaplain. Boys who used to come to high school with their shirts sloppy, their ties crooked, their hair a Mess, would all of a sudden come in with shirts and pants pressed, the double windsor knot perfect, with every strand of hair shampooed and combed or gelled in place. When I would note the positive change that had taken place within them and ask, “What’s her name?,” they would think I was a soul-reading genius. But what was going on was crystal clear: they had fallen in love and that love gave meaning to everything they did, including how they prepared for school. If this is what can happen with a teenage crush, imagine what is supposed to happen when we realize that God loves us with an infinite, unchanging love? If the words “I love you” can make a dramatic difference in a young person’s existence, what about Jesus’ saying, “I love you just as the Father loves me?”
• In one of the most famous passages of his pontificate, Saint John Paul II stated, “Man cannot live without love. 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” (Redemptor Hominis, 10) If this is true about the human love we find in the family, in friendships, and in marriage, how much more is it true about the love of God? There’s a reason for this: since we’re made in the image and likeness of God who is love, if we don’t live in love, if we don’t dwell in a loving communion of persons, then we’re lost before God, before others, and within ourselves. That’s why Jesus says to us, emphatically, that he loves us, and that he loves us as purely and perfectly as the Father loves him.
• But Jesus doesn’t stop there. He tells us, “Remain in my love.” He knows that many of us run away from love in general and his love in particular. Burning love from someone else can make us feel uncomfortable because we may not think we’re worthy of it, because we know that the only response to love is to love back and we fear we may not be capable of it. Love is meant to change us, to lift us up, and sometimes we don’t want to cooperate with that resurrection. Like St. Peter after the Lord showed his love for him in his first miraculous catch of fish, we can cry out, “Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man.” 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.
• But Jesus never gives us a task without providing the means. He tells us clearly how to remain in his 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 retract it — but because the commandments all train how love to live in the love of God and in the love of neighbor. 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 human relationships or material goods with which he has blessed them. 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 us. The commandments train us how to love, and, therefore, how to remain in the love of God, since God is love. Jesus adds here that he’s not asking of us anything he himself hasn’t done. He says, “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 he loves and seek to do what he out of love wills for us and others.
• But even after telling us how to remain in his love through keeping the commandments, he makes everything simpler still, telling us: “This is my commandment, love one another as I have loved you.” And he makes clear how he loves us and what real love leads to and is: It culminates in a total gift of ourselves for those whom we love. “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Jesus wants us to love one another to the point of giving of our lives for them, as he gave his life for us. While few of us will be required to die for others, when we’re willing to do so, then we’re much more willing to make the types of smaller sacrifices that are necessary for love to remain and grow: forgiving others, being patient with them, sacrificing some of our desires to help them fulfill their own, and so on. As Jesus says that the greatest love is to lay down one’s life for one’s friends, he immediately tells us, “You are my friends.” He calls us friends, he regards us as friends, because he has revealed to us everything he has heard from God the Father and has chosen and appointed us to go and bear fruit that will remain. And the way we reciprocate his love of friendship, is, he says, by doing what he commands, and laying down our life for him, our Friend, and for his friends.
• And so we see in these words of Jesus the whole pattern of the Christian life, which begins with grace, received in faith, overflowing in love. It begins, as St. John says in the second reading, not with our love but with God’s love, who sent his Son to lay down his life for us. But then that love transforms us so that we are strengthened from within to love by that same standard. Jesus says, “Just as the Father loves me, so I love you,” and he wants to help us to say, “Just as Jesus loves me, so I love you,” treating others as friends with a willingness to sacrifice for them, to reveal to them what we have heard from God, to choose them whom God has chosen and to seek to bear fruit with them to eternal life.
• And the fruit of this entire experience of being loved by God and loving according to God’s measure is true Christian happiness. Jesus says, “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy might be complete.” The fruit of love is joy. We experience joy when we know how loved we are by God. We experience joy when we remain peacefully in that love without struggle. We experience joy when we share the love we have received with others and help them in turn learn the joy of being loved. We experience that joy even in great sacrifice made out of love for others, like we see in the stories of martyrs across the centuries, who were honored and willing to give their lives for the One who had given his life for theirs, for the ones for whom he had given his life, and out of witness to the love of God that conquers even death.
• The Lord knows that the standard of love to which he calls us is not easy. But every day at the altar he provides the means. No one has greater love than to lay down his life for his friends, and every day he gives us access to that very love and life. He says we are his friends if we do what he commands us and on the same night he gave us the words of today’s Gospel, he told us, “Do this in memory of me.” Here we do what he commands. In the Holy Eucharist, we receive the greatest act of love that the world has ever known, Jesus’ own self-giving love from the Upper Room and Calvary in expiation for our sins, what Jesus called “the Sacrament of Love” in his appearances to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque 350 years ago. It is in this love, given to us each day on the altar, that we become capable of loving each other with the love of Christ. There is no greater love than the love we are about to receive. Let us abide in that love, and from the inside, learn from Jesus how to love in this greater way, as missionaries of this charity, by giving our body and blood out of love for him and for others.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Alleluia JN 14:23

R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Whoever loves me will keep my word, says the Lord,
and my Father will love him and we will come to him.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.

Gospel JN 15:9-17

Jesus said to his disciples:
“As the Father loves me, so I also love you.
Remain in my love.
If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love,
just as I have kept my Father’s commandments
and remain in his love.

“I have told you this so that my joy may be in you
and your joy might be complete.
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.”

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