The Way the Love of God Was Revealed To Us, Sixth Sunday of Easter (B), May 5, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, New York
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: 

• In the midst of the ongoing traumas, controversies and difficulties that have dramatically disrupted campus life, as students go through the various highs and lows associated with final exams, papers, moving out and transitioning to the summer or to life after Columbia, the Lord wants to help us focus on the most important constant in human life. Last week, you recall, Jesus gave us the image of the Vine and the Branches and told us that if we remain in him and he in us then he promised us we would bear great fruit. Today’s words come right after that image. Having spoken about what we might call the ontological communion that’s meant to exist between us and Jesus and in Jesus with others, Jesus turns to the moral communion. I think they constitute 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 when he did, in the way that he did, 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. On the night he would be betrayed by Judas and abandoned by the others, rather than thinking about the enormous physical sufferings he would endure within hours, he prioritized telling the apostles, and through them, us, “I love you.” But then Jesus puts those words into a context that ought to astound us even more: “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 to unite us to God and to all the other members of Jesus’ Mystical Body. 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’ve seen it several times over the course of my priesthood when children in foster care get adopted. I saw it regularly 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. 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. I’ve seen similar quasi-miraculous transformations many times here on campus during my first two years. If this is what can happen with a 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?” Jesus wants us to experience that life-changing truth.
• 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, in chaste romances 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.
• The future John Paul II as a young priest was a university chaplain at St. Florian’s Church in Krakow. There he saw that many young people, made by God who is love, in love and for love, often lacked love, especially because of the traumas of the Second World War in which so many people in Poland were killed and the Nazi and then the Communist ideologies, neither of which had room for real love because it got in the way of totalitarian control. As a result they often sought love not where it could truly be found, but in various counterfeits, like utilitarian or mutually hedonistic relationships, in momentary feelings, or in different types of worldly ambitions. Father Karol Wojtyla sought in his work to try to introduce Christ’s love into the human experience of seeking love, because he knew that their hearts would be restless, as St. Augustine taught, until they rest in God and his enduring love. Students today can make similar mistakes. Many have been love-deprived in one way or another and they seek the love of a father, or a mother, the love of a brother, sister, or friends in relationships that aren’t really ordered to true love, to permanent commitment, and therefore will never be able to deliver. Because they haven’t experienced being loved at the depth of their being, they can struggle with self-esteem issues and as a result are prone to seeking their meaning in fame, money, influence, or a prestigious degree, and are vulnerable to being taken advantage of by people instrumentalizing them for their own pleasures and aims.
• 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. He wanted that to be the foundation of the life of the first disciples and apostles, so that they would know of the love of God even after their abandoning him, so that after his resurrection, they might learn how to receive it and live it. He wants us to know it, too. St. John, who was with Jesus that night, was transformed by his words. He not only wrote them down for all of us in the Gospel that bears his name, but regularly spoke of them to the next generation of the disciples. “In this way the love of God was revealed to us,” he wrote to the first Christians, “God sent his only Son into the world so that we might have life through him. In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.” Jesus is the incarnation of the love of God for each of us. He loved me, he loved you, and as St. Paul said, he gave his life up not just for the human race but for “me.”
• But Jesus doesn’t stop there with the proclamation of his love in the Upper Room and on Calvary. 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 can think we’re worthy of it, or because we know that the only response to love is to love back and we fear we may not be capable of doing so faithfully. Love is meant to change us, to lift us up, and sometimes we just 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, not, “Thank you, Jesus. I love you, too!,” but “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. We don’t have to earn his love, we just need to accept it, marinate ourselves in it, and respond to it.
• That response is the third step in today’s Gospel. Jesus 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 see this readily by looking at the Decalogue. 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 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, Latin for 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 Jesus out of love for us makes it even simpler for us to know how to remain in his love. This is the fourth step in the Gospel. He summarizes all commandments into one, which he calls a “new” commandment and even “my” commandment. “This is my commandment,” he states, “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,” and then calls us his friends because he has revealed to us everything he heard from his Father. Jesus wants us to help us in turn to learn how 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. St. John makes that very practical in the second reading when he tells the first Christians, “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God. Whoever is without love does not know God for God is love.” We have to love others to abide in God’s love, to know God and the love he gives.
• 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 be able to say, to each other and to others, “Just as Jesus loves me, so I love you,” treating others, like he treats us, 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, the happiest person who ever lived, says in today’s Gospel, “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. Pope Francis has said repeatedly that the true mark of a Christian is joy and that joy is a fruit of knowing we’re loved by God, remaining in that love, and loving others like Christ loves, and remaining in those bonds of love, too.
• 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, he says, 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 commanded us, “Do this in memory of me.” Here we do. 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. It is here that we will be equipped to bring that love outward to campus at a time in which it very much needs it. There is indeed no greater love than the love we are about to receive. If, as St. John Paul II declared, man cannot live without love, if his life will remain incomprehensible and senseless if he doesn’t encounter love, experience it, make it his own and intimately share in it, then here Christ gives us that remedy. Every time we receive the Eucharist, Jesus says to us, “Just as the Father loves me, I love you right now as I give my Body and Blood, my whole life, for you. You are my friend. You are precious to me. Remain in my love by abiding in my Eucharistic presence. And learn from me from the inside how to love in this greatest way of all, by giving your body and blood out of love for others and for me. This is the way you will be filled with my joy in this world and forever.” Amen.

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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