The Love By Which Jesus Makes All Things New, Fifth Sunday of Easter (C), May 15, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Joseph Church, Fall River, MA
Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year C
May 15, 2022
Acts 14:21-27, Ps 145, Rev 21:1-5, Jn 13:31-35

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

This is the text that guided today’s homily: 

Throughout the Easter Season, we ponder the revolutionary aspect that Christ’s resurrection has in the big picture of the salvation of the world and is meant to have in your life and mine. Christ has truly risen and that means that sin and death do not have the last word, but God, holiness and eternal life do. In today’s passage from the Book of Revelation, we get an image of the “new heaven,” “new earth” and “new Jerusalem,” that Jesus’ resurrection makes possible. The One sitting on the throne, the image of God the Father, says, in fact, “Behold, I make all things new.” Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection, in other words, has changed everything. “The old order,” we’re told, “has passed away.” But this newness is not just supposed to be a future reality for which we hope. It’s meant to be a present, life-changing reality here and now. That comes about because the Risen Lord Jesus remains with us, infusing every human reality, including the most challenging ones, with divine meaning. The loud voice from the throne says, “Behold, God’s dwelling is with the human race. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will always be with them as their God.” In the Easter Season we focus on how the Risen Lord Jesus is with us always until the end of time, accompanying us, enlightening us, strengthening us, nourishing us, forgiving us, uniting us to him and helping us to fulfill his saving Mission, sending us forth to help others, who are living according to the “old order,” experience that same revolutionary newness and enter into relationship with him who dwells Risen among us.

In the Gospel today, Jesus, the One who makes all things new, speaks to us about the way we will experience that newness. With words he proclaimed during the Last Supper that the Church ponders in the light of his Resurrection, he tells us, “I give you a new commandment. Love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.” Up until that point, as you know, the Jewish people, even Jesus’ followers, had lived by the two-fold commandment that God had given them in the Old Testament, on which Jesus said all the law and the prophets depend: to love God with all their mind, heart, soul and strength and to love their neighbor as themselves. Jesus’ “new commandment” was new in both respects. First, it would start not with our loving God with all we have, but God’s loving us so much that he entered the human race, taking on our humanity so that he could give it, down to the last drop of his blood, to save us forever.

Everything begins with “as I have loved you.” God’s love for us shown in Christ changes and refreshes everything. That’s the radical newness that will never be out of date. When we think about Jesus’ birth, growth, preaching and teaching, miracles, suffering, death and resurrection, we cannot treat them just as the mind-blowing historical facts that they are; each was done out of love for us, out of love for you and for me. When we were being held hostage by sin, the Good Shepherd loved us so much that he heroically entered the world to rescue us, giving his life to set us free, and rising on the third day out of love as well so that we might share with him that triumph into eternity. If Liam Neeson’s daughter in the Hollywood Blockbuster Taken recognized the love of her dad in all he died to free her from human traffickers in France, how much more should we recognize Jesus’ incredible love in our real-life liberation. Many Christians do not stop enough to ponder just how much God loves us not in soft, mushy feelings but in deeds. We have so many self-esteem issues and have developed so many false coping mechanisms as a result, as we look for love and meaning in places that can never ultimately deliver. Our renewal, the renewal of others, and in fact the renewal of the world begins with recognizing the love God has for us and remaining in that love, allowing it to become the defining reality, the indestructible foundation of our life.

The second step in that renewal is for us to love others as God has loved us first. Sometimes when we hear this divine command, we can understand it as “paying forward” the love we’ve received: if Jesus sacrificed so much for us, then we, out of grateful duty, ought to sacrifice for others. But Jesus gives us this imperative for a much deeper reason. When we have really experienced his love for others, we can’t keep it to ourselves. When we begin to love others as Jesus loves us, we become far more like Jesus and far more capable of receiving more of the infinite love he has for us. If we’re going to experience the newness his resurrection is meant to have, it’s going to come through loving others with the love of Christ. Sacrificial love renews us. We see that renewal, for example, in young parents who sacrifice time, money and sleep to care for their newborn. We see it in spouses who forgive each other and give the other a second, or third, or seventy-seventh chance. We see it in those who volunteer to feed the less fortunate. We see it in those who sacrifice their money to make it possible for someone from a poor family to receive an education. We see it in seminarians and young religious who give up careers and even the great goods of marriage and family in order to bring Christ to others. The One who makes all things new wants us to experience the radical joy of this newness not just once or episodically but routinely, by helping us to become full-time self-givers, men and women, boys and girls who use our time, the human gifts he’s given us, the material resources with which he’s blessed us, even our whole life on earth to love others in concrete deeds as he has loved us first.

Therefore, it’s important, today, for each of us to hear Jesus’ command with fresh ears and as marching orders for our happiness in this life and in the new heavens and new earth. It’s important for us to recognize that God continues to dwell with us precisely so that we may experience his love, live in that love, and let that love overflow in the way we love our neighbors, our family members, even those who have made themselves our enemies. The problem is, for many Christians, Jesus’ revolutionary words, “As I have loved you, so you also should love one another,” can, after 2,000 years of hearing them, come off as flat. His command, “Love one another as I have loved you,” has become perhaps the most watered-down line in Sacred Scripture. Many of us can think we love by the fact that we have sympathy for others, that we don’t hate them, that we hope they have a good life and don’t stick our nose into their business. Some of us, while professing to be Christian, don’t even rise to that standard, but instead think we can hate, rather than love, our enemies, because, we tell ourselves, they hated us first. We facilely demonize figures we think are unworthy of our love, like those committing grave evils and injustices, people like Payton Gendron, the 18 year old who murdered 11 people yesterday afternoon in a Buffalo supermarket, or Vladimir Putin whose decisions have led to so much death and destruction in Ukraine, like Chinese, Cuban and Venezuelan communists who repress their people, like abortion doctors and pro-abortion politicians whose choices have led to 63 million deaths in the US since Roe v. Wade, even like family members and former friends who have wronged us. The coarseness of our polarized culture has led many Catholics on Twitter, for example, to become expert in attacking, criticizing, insulting, mocking, humiliating, and condemning those with whom they disagree, even fellow Catholics, because they think differently on political, ecclesial or other matters. While many of us justify our grievances and our bad behavior based on those grievances, Jesus is telling us to love one another as he loved us on Calvary.

The consequences of living by Jesus’ command and experiencing the renewal to which it leads are enormous, not only to our relationship with Jesus and our eternal salvation, but to the mission of the Church as a whole. Jesus tells us very clearly at the end of today’s Gospel passage that the way others will know we’re his followers, the way in fact that we’ll glorify God, is through really loving each other as Jesus loves us and them, sacrificing for each other, forgiving each other, treating others with heartfelt affection — and not just doing so “a little,” but loving with all our mind, heart, soul and strength. The corollary is also true. If we do not really love one another in deeds, then we will show we’re not Jesus’ followers but fakers, hypocrites, unfaithful Catholics — even if we happen to be ordained or have made religious vows, even if we’ve given millions to Catholic schools and universities, even if we’re known among our circles as the most devout. Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount that it’s easy to love those who love us, even the pagans do that; but he calls us to love by his standard, to respond as he does even to those who have made themselves our enemies, like Saints Paul and Barnabas did in today’s first reading, who taught that it was necessary to undergo many hardships to enter the kingdom of God, to live as Christians in the middle of the world. Jesus calls us as Christians to embrace these difficulties, love even those who drive us crazy, who speak ill of us, who seek to harm us, He calls us to far more than not retaliating by lowering ourselves to their levels. He wants us to rise to his level, to sacrifice for them, to fast for them, to pray for their conversion, to forgive them before they ask, to entrust them to his mercy, to help them out should they be in need. What a tremendous witness is given whenever anyone loves like that. Christ’s true disciples are known by those who love one another in the same wholehearted, sacrificial way as Christ has loved us. The Church is mean to be known by this type of divine charity.

Earlier today in St. Peter’s Square Pope Francis canonized ten new saints. The saints are those who have recognized the incredible love God has for them and have sought to let that love become the defining reality of their life and their choices. St. Titus Brandsma, a Dutch Carmelite priest and journalist, ultimately gave his life trying to defend the Jews in print and was arrested by the Nazis, tortured, and killed in the Dachau concentration camp. St. Charles de Foucault, a Trappist monk, recognized that Christians and Muslims did not genuinely love each other and so at great risk sought to bring that love even to desert Bedouins, where he was killed eventually by Algerian marauders. Indian layman St. Devasahayam Pillai, a convert from Hinduism, sought to witness the love of God to his former fellow Hindus and unmask the lack of love in the caste system, being arrested, tortured and martyred for it. St. Justin Russolillo, the founder of the Society of Divine Vocations to which Bishop da Cunha belongs, showed particular love for poor boys and girls with vocations to the priesthood and religious life whose families did not have the resources to pay for their religious training, as well as for seminarians, religious and even priests who had temporarily abandoned their vocations because of injustices. St. Marie Rivier, St. Cesar de Bus, St. Maria Francesca Rubatto and St. Luigi Palazzolo all founded orders to educate and catechize young people so that they might recognize God’s love and build up their families, society and the Church in the love of God. St. Maria di Gesu Santocanale and St. Maria Domenica Montovani founded religious institutes to care for the sick, poor, disabled, abandoned and elderly. All ten of these new saints, having been loved by God, loved others in different ways with that same love. They themselves experienced the newness of Christ’s resurrection and because his instruments to renew the face of the earth. The Lord wishes to do similar things in each of us, if only we say yes to him as they did, if only we receive and reciprocate God’s love as they did, if only we allow him to make us, and through us all things, new.

The way this renewal happens is here at Mass. This is where the Risen Lord Jesus, whose dwelling is with the human race, seeks to make his dwelling within us. This is where he, in the great sacrament of his love, gives us himself in such a way that he seeks to inspire us to “do this in memory of” him, giving our body, our blood, our time, our sweat, even our life in communion with him for others. This is where he strengthens us for whatever hardships we’ll need to endure for his name. This is where the Son of Man is glorified and where we get a foretaste of the new heaven, new earth, and new Jerusalem that his resurrection makes possible.

The old order has indeed passed away. Jesus, here, brings us into that new order, that new life, that new kingdom of love to which the saints give witness, the kingdom meant to last forever, the kingdom for which he created and redeemed us.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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