The Human Conditions for Receiving God’s Unconditional Love, 5th Monday of Easter, April 30, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the Fifth Week of Easter
Memorial of St. Pius V
April 30, 2018
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: 

• Throughout Jesus’ Last Supper discourses that we re-read over the last half of the Easter season in the light and joy of the Resurrection, Jesus speaks to us of love: the Father’s love for him, his love for us, our love for him, and our love for each other. This gets us to the heart of our faith: God is love and has made us in his image and likeness and so we don’t understand him, ourselves, others, or the deepest realities of human existence without coming to understand, according to our capacities, this beautiful mystery.
• Today Jesus says something to us about love that’s 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. John tells us in his first letter, “In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.” 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. “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us (Rom 5:8). 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” (Mt 5:45).
• 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. Pope Francis likes to use the analogy of the human heart with its systolic and diastolic functions: if it’s not pumping out blood, it’s dead and incapable of receiving blood within. So if our heart is hardened toward the love of God and neighbor, which is the two-fold principle on the basis of which everything in the law and prophets depends (Mt 22:40), then we cannot receive the constant and unconditional love of God. Pope Benedict used to say, love is 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? Today we can focus on seven things.
• The first is God’s commandments. Jesus tells us, “Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me. Whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him.” The commandments he has given us train us to love and open us up to the experience of God’s love as we emulate it toward him and others. The commandments show us how to love God and others: we can’t love God when we’re worshipping other gods, or using his name as a throwaway term, or blowing him off on the day we call his. We can’t love others when we’re dishonoring them, killing them, exploiting them for our gratification, stealing from them, deceiving them, or getting upset that God blesses them with loved ones and material things. If we choose, instead, not to love them by breaking the commandments, we’re hardening our hearts to receive God’s prior love.
• The second thing is God’s word. Jesus says, “Whoever loves me will keep my word, and … Whoever does not love me does not keep my words.” If we love someone we want to remain faithful to them, we want to please them. Jesus, in giving us his word, is giving us his love, and to remain in his love, as we heard yesterday in his words on the Vine and the Branches that we will hear again this week, we have to remain in his word. There’s no separation. His words are an expression of his love to us and our keeping them is an expression of our receiving that love with gratitude and responding.
• The third thing is 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 receive God’s love by helping us to remember what Jesus taught and put it into practice with passion, will help us to love God and our neighbor with all our mind, heart, soul and strength. The Holy Spirit is “God’s love poured into our heart” (Rom 5:5). He opens us to receive the love of God and to reciprocate it as much loved sons and daughters. He helps us to remain in God’s love as Jesus will command us later in the week.
• The fourth reality is humiliate, which  makes us love God more than we love ourselves and 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 love and adore the one true God. Their love for God absolutely prevented this diversion of love for them instead of Him. “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, to follow the Holy Spirit, 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 love God as God wanted to be loved, they didn’t want to enter into the love of the Covenant on God’s terms. Paul and Barnabas were humble enough to do so, however, because they didn’t want to be gods but to glorify God through their own decrease so that He might increase.
• The fifth reality we need is suffering, which prunes us to love God more. Yesterday and again on Wednesday, we will hear 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 see earlier in Acts 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. We grow in love that way.
• The sixth and seventh realities are revealed to us through the life of the saint we celebrate today, Pope St. Pius V. This sixth reality of readiness for God’s love is a desire for reform, of continual conversion. He is probably the most famous pope of the counter-Reformation, seeking to solidify the reforms of the Council of Trent. He reformed the way the Church prayed the Mass, prayed various of the Sacraments, and prayed the liturgy of the hours. He helped form the first seminaries to train future priests to learn how to love God and love others without scandal (before they were trained in apprenticeships, and if the priest teacher weren’t holy, it would be hard to produce future holy priests). Even in Sacramental encounters, many weren’t meeting the love of God and he wanted to help the Church come back. It’s an opportunity for us to examine how much we look at the Mass as God’s great act of love for us and how much love we put into it as a response. The same thing goes for the liturgy of the hours, the other sacraments and our various acts of piety.
• The last condition for our openness we can mention, based on St. Pius V, would be the Blessed Mother. St. Pius V had a great confidence in our Lady’s intercession and example as the one to help us learn how to receive God’s love and to love him back. She perfectly kept God’s commandments, never sinning. She loved the Word of God so much that it could take on her own flesh in the womb. She was always overshadowed and docile to the work of the Holy Spirit. She was exalted because of her humility. She had her heart pierced out of love for God. She shows us better than anyone else how to love God with ad-oratio, with the love of “mouth to mouth” contact. When Christians were battling Muslims off the coast of Greece in October 1571 as Muslims were seeking to invade Europe, Pope St. Pius V led the Church in prayer to the Blessed Virgin Mary by means of the Rosary and God gave him images of what was happening in battle hundreds of miles away, images that proved true when triumphant Christian sailors returned to Rome months later. Similarly for all of us Mary not only shows us the way but intercedes for us in the even greater battle to love God and defeat the troops of the evil one who refuses love and seeks to get us to echo that refusal.
• As we begin our day the way St. Pius V would begin his, at Mass, we ask through his intercession that we truly meet in the Mass God’s unconditional love for us and let that love overflow into unconditional love for others, fulfilling the commands God gives us. It’s here at Mass 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 humbly 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, like St. Pius V, may live in Holy Communion with them and with each other.

The readings for today’s Mass were: