6th Sunday of Easter
There is a story about an American
Cardinal who in some of those topsy-turvy years immediately following the
Second Vatican Council (in the late 60’s or early 70’s) was presiding at a
Mass, but was not the homilist. Rather, the priest who was preaching got up
and began his homily by saying: “Love…love, love, love.” Just that far into it and the Cardinal had
apparently had enough, so he stood up and began to chant, “Credo in unum Deum,” skipping right over the homily and immediately
intoning the Creed, in Latin no less.
Who knows what the content of that homily might have been, but
apparently the Cardinal felt the “love” that this priest was peddling was more
of the “ooey-gooey” variety, and he was having none of it.
I mention this because, of course, in
the Gospel this Sunday we hear a lot about love. In fact, we have and will continue to hear a
lot of this Gospel in these days. A
portion of this passage was the Gospel for Friday of this past week, and this
is also the Gospel that we selected for our Commencement Mass this coming
Saturday, for those who may be joining us.
And so, we have and will continue to hear a lot about love. It might start to sound a little like the
beginning of that homily that was so abruptly concluded by the Cardinal:
“Love…love, love, love.”
But there is an opportunity here to
understand the true nature of love, specifically the love that Christ is
talking about and asking us to imitate in this Gospel passage. I can’t recall if I have mentioned this in any
of my earlier homilies this year (we priests tend to recycle from ourselves a
lot), but even if I have, a reminder never hurts: there are multiple words for
love in the Greek language, in which the Gospels and the entire New Testament
were originally composed. There is a
particular word for friendship love, for romantic love, for familial love, but
then there is this word agape,
translated into Latin as caritas and
into English as charity. This is a particularly powerful form of love
that, as my Greek teacher drilled in to me, is a “self-sacrificial love that
stops at nothing for the good of the other.”
It is no surprise, then, that this is the word that we find on Jesus’
lips here in John’s Gospel as He talks about the Father’s love for Him, the
love that He has for his disciples, and the love that they, in turn, are called
to “remain in” by keeping His commandments and to imitate by their way of life.
In fact, Jesus Himself clearly
indicates the nature of this love when immediately after saying, “This is my
commandment: love one another as I love you,” he adds, “No one has greater love
than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” And so, this is a love that means “laying
down one’s life.” It is that
“self-sacrificial love that stops at nothing for the good of the other.” This is no passive or merely emotional
love. This is certainly not an
“ooey-gooey” love. It is a hard love, but also a more beautiful love, a
more enduring love.
As you can imagine, we have a lot of
weddings here at Christ the King Chapel, weddings of alumni who wish to come
back to this place that meant so much to them in their faith lives and who,
perhaps, met their spouse here while they were students. While the couples are different, the readings
for these weddings are very often the same, or very nearly same. Almost all of them feature that famous
passage from 1st Corinthians: “Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, is not pompous,” etc. And so, I have the frequent occasion of
preaching on love. But there is an
opportunity on these occasions of weddings to, again, remind them of the true
nature of the love they are pledging to each other in this sacrament. I tell them that they are truly laying down
their lives for each other. This seems
easy on a beautiful day, when those doors open and radiantly she makes her way
down the aisle, when he stands here, sharp in his tux, smiling with a tear in
his eye. It is a little harder even a
few months in. It’s harder still five
years in, twenty years in, and so forth.
And so, I think it is important to drive home to couples the message
that the love they are about to promise to each other in their vows is this hard,
agape love that “stops at nothing for
the good of the other.” I don’t say this
to poor cold water on the flames of emotion on their special day, or like some
curmudgeonly Cardinal, to abruptly snap them back to reality, but in fact to
give them something that will be far more beautiful and more lasting than the
dress, the flowers and the cake.
Where does this love, this agape love begin? What are its origins? Jesus says clearly, “As the Father loves me, so I also love you.” Saint John in his first letter elaborates
further: “In this is love: not that we have loved God, but the he loved us.” This is truly a divine love, a love that
begins in God. The first step, then, in
living this love is first acknowledging that God loves us first, and in openly receiving that love.
It is true that we are called love one
another, to “lay down our lives” for each other, especially for those who feel
most unloved or perhaps even unlovable in a broken world. But this is not possible apart from God’s
love, as though we were somehow the origin of this love. Notice those conditional phrases: “As the Father loves me, so I love you”;
“Love one another as I love you.” It always goes back to God. And so, if we cannot or will not first allow
ourselves to be loved by God, truly opening our hearts to this love, then we
will have none of it to give.
To
be perfectly honest, I think this is something that as Catholics we struggle
with. What we often call “Catholic
guilt” is sometimes, more truly, Catholic shame, or Catholic
self-loathing. We won’t let ourselves be
loved by God because of this sense of total and abject unworthiness in the face
of God’s love. This is not of God. This is a kind of spiritual poison that will
not only destroy us, but keep us from loving others as we should. I am more and more convinced that we will
love to the degree that we allow ourselves to be loved by God. And so, yes, let us say often, “Love…love, love, love,” but knowing what
this word really means, that there is no
greater love than to lay down our lives for others; knowing that this love
begins in God, and that this is the love we are called first to receive and
then to give.