Sixth Sunday of Easter (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, May 8, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter (B), Vigil
May 8, 2021

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into what I think may be perhaps the most consequential conversation of all time, in the Risen Lord Jesus’ words to the apostles that constitute our Gospel passage this Sunday.
• Jesus tells us, “Just as the Father loves me, so I love you.” We know that God the Father cannot possibly love God the Son more perfectly, or deeply, or better than he does. 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. Since God is love, he wishes to bring us into that 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 hair shampooed and coiffed 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 God loves us permanently? If the words “I love you” can make a dramatic difference in someone’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.” If this is true about the human love we find in the family, in friendships, and in romantic relationships especially marriage, how much more is it true about the love of God? There’s a reason for this: we’re made in the image and likeness of God who is love, who exists in a loving communion of persons. 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 the consequential conversation with 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 don’t think we’re worthy of it, because we perhaps know that the only response to love is to love back and we fear we’re not 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 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.
• Third, he tells us 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 are all about living in the love of God and in 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 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.
• Fourth, after telling us to remain in his love by keeping his commandments, he summarizes and synthesizes what’s he’s commanding: “This is my commandment, love one another as I have loved you.” And he shows us what real love is and leads to. It culminates in a total gift of ourselves for those 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: 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 that philia, that love of friendship, is, he says, by doing what he commands, and laying down our life for him, our friend, and for his friends.
• We see in these words of Jesus the whole pattern of the Christian life, which begins with grace, received in faith, overflowing in love. Jesus says, “Just as the Father loves me, so I love you,” and wants us to say, “Just as Jesus loves me, so I love you,” treating others as friends with a willingness to sacrifice for him, 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.
• The fruit of this Christian love life is also very clear. Jesus says in this Sunday’s consequential conversation: “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 that love we have received with others and help them experience 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 singing hymns on the road to execution as if they were proceeding to a wedding, because they rejoiced that they had the opportunity to give their lives for the one who had given his life for theirs, because they were able to give the supreme witness to the love of God that conquers even death.
• This experience of love is something that so many of us have experienced in the family thanks to the love of our mom and dad. As we prepare to celebrate Mother’s Day, we know that motherhood is meant to be one of the greatest and clearest examples of the type of love Jesus describes. And hence Mother’s day is a special day on which we thank our mothers for all their acts of love, big and small, over the years: their loving us into existence, their caring for us in the womb, their feeding us with their breasts and by their hands, their clothing us, their bathing us, their teaching us how to walk, their teaching us how to read, their teaching us how to love, their bringing us to be baptized, their teaching us how to pray, and so much more. Only God knows the hundreds of thousands of loving sacrifices they have made for us over the years. Perhaps more than any other figure, they have said to us, “Just as God has loved me, I love you,” and helped us to believe that we are lovable. None of our mothers is perfect; they have all made mistakes big and small as they tried to raise us; but none of us would be here today without them. On Mother’s day, we have the opportunity to put into action what one modern saint called the “sweetest commandment of all” and unite that Fourth Commandment to the First by honoring our mothers, thanking them, and thanking God for them. It is an opportunity to love them back, whether they are still with us on earth, or if not, with God, we pray, in heaven. Wherever they are, we ask that as a result of God’s love and our love, they may have Jesus’ joy in them and their joy may be eternally complete.

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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