Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Tag: love

  • The Third Sunday of Easter

    The Third Sunday of Easter

    Today’s readings

    What Satan wants is a community of disciples so mired in their sins, that they do nothing to foster the Kingdom of God and live the Gospel. Bookmark that thought, because I’ll come back to it in a bit.

    I love today’s Gospel because it features one of my favorite characters, Saint Peter. Saint Peter has been inspirational to me because, despite being called to do great things for God, he does a lot of messing up and often has to pick himself up and start all over again. Today’s Gospel reading has him trying to figure things out. He’s very recently been through the arrest and execution of his Lord, only to find out that he is risen, and has appeared to various disciples, including Peter himself. I think today’s story has him trying to make sense of it all and figure out where to go from here. But he’s trying to figure it out in the midst of having fallen again, since he denied even knowing the Lord three times on the night of Holy Thursday.

    So, in an effort to figure things out, he goes back to what he knows best, which is to say he goes fishing. And he takes some of the others with him. And, as is very typical of Peter’s fishing expeditions recorded in the Gospels, he catches nothing even though he’s been hard at it all night long. It’s not until the Lord is with them again and redirects their efforts, that they eventually pull in an incredibly large catch of fish. Jesus then invites them to dine with him, using one of my favorite commands in all of Sacred Scripture, “Come, have breakfast.”

    Then we have this very interesting, and in some ways tense, conversation between Jesus and Peter. Jesus takes him off to the side after breakfast, and just as he redirected Peter’s efforts while they were fishing earlier, now he redirects Peter’s efforts in his life. There are a couple of points of background that we need to keep in mind. First, just as Peter three times denied his Lord on the night of Holy Thursday, so now Jesus gives him three opportunities to profess his love and get it right.

    Second, the Greek language has a few different words that we translate “love.” Two of them are in play in this conversation. The first is agapeo, which is the highest form of love. It’s a love that always wills the best for the other person, a love that is self-sacrificing and enduring. It’s the love that God has for us. The other kind of love that is used here is phileo, a bit lower form of love that is something like a strong affection for someone else. Where agapeo is an act of the will, phileo is more of a feeling. Many scholars don’t see this as an appreciable difference and say John in his Gospel just uses two different words to mean the same thing. But I think John is careful with language, and the two uses mean something, as we will see.

    So the conversation begins, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” That’s literally a loaded question, so let’s look at it. First of all, Jesus calls Peter “Simon, son of John.” But Jesus is the one who changed his name from Simon to Peter. So this seems to be a bit of a rebuke: Okay, Peter, if you’re just going to revert to your former self and pretend you haven’t known me the last three years, then I’ll just use your old name. I’m sure Peter didn’t miss the inference. Then at the end, “do you love me more than these?” Scholars have a lot of opinions on what “these” are: Do you love me more than you love these other guys? Do you love me more than these other guys love me? Do you love me more than this fishing equipment, the tools of your former life? It doesn’t matter what he meant by “these,” the effect is the same: Peter is called to a higher love, which is evidenced in the word Jesus uses for love, which is agapeo. Peter responds, acknowledging Jesus’ omniscience, “Lord you know that I love you.” But he uses phileo, perhaps acknowledging that he is not capable of the agapeo kind of love. And he’s probably right about that, since sin does diminish our capacity to love. He receives the response “Feed my lambs,” of which I’ll say more later.

    The conversation continues in the same manner, using the same forms of the word “love” in both the question and the response, and ending with the injunction, “Tend my sheep.” But the third question is interesting. Jesus asks the third time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” But this time Jesus uses the word phileo, as much as to say, “Okay, Peter, do you even have affection for me?” And Peter seems to get the inference, because he responds emotionally: “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” And he’s right: Jesus does know. But Jesus needed Peter to know it too. Jesus, in his Divine Mercy, has healed Peter, forgiven his sins, and helped him to remember his mission, redirecting his efforts to “Feed my sheep.”

    Because if Jesus hadn’t done this, Satan would have won. He would have had that community of disciples so mired in their sins, that they do nothing to foster the Kingdom of God and live the Gospel. And then we wouldn’t be here today, would we?

    And let’s be clear about this. We, like Peter, all have a mission to accomplish. We all have some part of the Kingdom to build. We may not be the rock on which Jesus will build his Church, but we are indeed part of it. And we are all, sadly, affected by our sins. We have all denied our Lord in one way or another by what we have done and what we have failed to do. And so the Lord, in his Divine Mercy, says to us today: “Patrick, do you love me?” “Susan do you love me?” And we respond with whatever love we’re capable of. In that moment, Jesus redirects our life’s efforts too, so that we can do what we’re called to do. We, who have been purified by our Lenten penance, are now called to the life of the Resurrection, in which all God’s lambs are cared for, and all his sheep tended.

    So ponder this question this week: “Do you love me more than these?”  “These” can be anything that is part and parcel of your life day in and day out.  Do you love the Lord more than “these”?  Then hear our Lord say to you: “Tend my sheep.”  Those sheep are whoever in your life are the ones who make up your life’s vocation, those people God has given you to love and care for.  Tend them with renewed authenticity.  Tend them with the same love our Lord has for you.  Tend his sheep.

    Because Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!

    Alleluia!

  • Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of Our Lord

    Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of Our Lord

    Today’s readings

    I often tell the children in our school that if there’s just one thing they ought to know about God, one thing they ever learn about God, and that is that God loves them more than anything, that would be enough.  It’s the thing that I hope they remember me saying, because that’s the message I feel called to proclaim.  God’s love is the most important thing we have in this life, the most precious gift we will ever receive.

    It is true gift, because there’s nothing, not one thing, that we can do to earn it.  Filthy in sin as we are, we certainly don’t do it. And entitled as we can sometimes be, there is no way we can ever say that we have a right to it.  But we get it anyway.  God freely pours out his love on us sinners, not because we are good, but because he is.

    God loves us first and loves us best, and it’s a love that will totally consume us, totally transform us, if we let it.  It’s a love that can break our stony hearts and transform our sadness into real joy. It’s a love that can change us from people of darkness to real live people of light and joy.  It’s a love that obliterates the power of sin and death to control our eternity, and opens up to us the glory of heaven.

    And even if we live our lives passing from one thing to the next and barely noticing anything going on around us, we have to pause and appreciate God’s love on this most holy morning.  This is the morning that confounded Mary of Magdala; it’s the morning that got Peter and John out of their funk and sent them running.  It’s the morning that John finally starts to get what Jesus was getting at all this time.  He saw and believed.

    He saw that his Lord was not there, that death could not hold him.  He saw that the grave was no longer the finality of existence.  He saw that Love – real Love – is in charge of our futures.  He saw that there is real hope available to us hopeless ones.

    “To him all the prophets bear witness,
    that everyone who believes in him
    will receive forgiveness of sins through his name.”

    That quote, from Saint Peter’s testimony in the Acts of the Apostles, today’s first reading, is the Easter faith to which we are all called.  We have to stop living like this is all there is. We have to stop loving our sins more than we love God.  We have to live like a people who have been loved into existence, and loved into redemption.

    That means we have to put aside our disastrous sense of entitlement. We have to learn to receive love so deep that it calls us to change.  And we have to love in the same way too, so that others will see that and believe.

    We’ll never find real love by burying ourselves in work or careers.  We’ll do nothing but damage our life if we seek to find it in substance abuse.  We’ll never find love by clinging to past hurts and resentments.  We are only going to find love in one place, or more precisely in one person, namely, Jesus Christ. We must let everything else – everything else – go.

    Today, Jesus Christ broke the prison-bars of death, and rose triumphant from the underworld.  What good would life have been to us, if Christ had not come as our Redeemer?  Because of this saving event, we can be assured that our own graves will never be our final resting places, that pain and sorrow and death will be temporary, and that we who believe and follow our risen Lord have hope of life that lasts forever.  Just as Christ’s own time on the cross and in the grave was brief, so our own pain, death, and burial will be as nothing compared to the ages of new life we have yet to receive.  We have hope in these days because Christ is our hope, and he has overcome the obstacles to our living.  

    The good news today is that we can find real love today and every day of our lives, by coming to this sacred place. It is here that we hear the Word proclaimed, here that we partake of the very Body and Blood of our Lord. An occasional experience of this mystery simply will not do – we cannot partake of it on Easter Sunday only.  No; we must nurture our faith by encountering our Risen Lord every day, certainly every Sunday, of our lives, by hearing that Word, and receiving his Body and Blood.  Anything less than that is seeking the living one among the dead.

    Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!  Alleluia!

  • The Thirty-first Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Thirty-first Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    When I was in seminary, I had a Scripture professor who, when someone would make an insightful comment or answer a question correctly, would exclaim, quoting Jesus in today’s Gospel reading, “You are not far from the kingdom of God!”  That comment, made to the scribe at the end of the reading, is an amazing thing to hear Jesus say, because he was always berating the scribes and Pharisees for not getting it, for being so concerned about dotting every “i” and crossing every “t” of the law, that they totally missed the spirit of the law.  Jesus always maintained that they were going to completely miss out on the kingdom of God because of this blindness.  So here is a scribe who actually gets it, who knows what the first of all of the commandments is.  But somehow, in the tone of his congratulatory statement, I think Jesus is throwing in a bit of a challenge to the scribe: now that you know it, it’s time to live it.

    The way it plays out, of course, is typical of the way we see the religious establishment interacting with Jesus in the Gospel narratives.  One of them approaches Jesus, most likely not out of an interest in actual dialogue or even to learn something, and asks a question to which they already know the right answer.  The question “Which is the first of all the commandments?” is one that scholars had long debated, because there were so many commandments.  Not, of course, just the ten that we are familiar with, but, throughout all of the Hebrew Scriptures, more than six hundred!  But the answer that Jesus gives is one that is well-accepted.  In fact, it is a part of scripture that Jews memorized and taught their children to memorize.  One that boiled it down to what worshipping One God meant:

    Hear, O Israel!
    The Lord our God is Lord alone!
    You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
    with all your soul,
    with all your mind,
    and with all your strength.

    But here’s the point where it really gets interesting: Jesus goes him one better, saying:

    The second is this:
    You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
    There is no other commandment greater than these.

    The scribe hadn’t asked for two greatest commandments, but if he had, he probably would have picked that second one too.  These two commandments boiled down all of the teaching of the law and the prophets into a neat, concise package: love God and love neighbor.  This was foundational to the Jewish way of life, and having been quoted so quickly, without thinking, by Jesus, no one was brave enough to ask him any more questions.  The scribe goes away close to the kingdom of God, if he will stop asking questions and actually living the law and the prophets.

    That challenge is there for us, too, of course.  Love of God and love of neighbor, loving the way God has loved us, this is the heart not just of the Old Testament law and the prophets, but also of the Gospel itself.  God, who loved us enough to send his only Son, so that we might believe in him and have eternal life, also sent that Son to show us the way.  So this Gospel interaction is foundational to our call as disciples.  In order to be on course for the kingdom of God, a place we all want to be, we have to love God and love our neighbor.  The kingdom of God is not a far-off distant thing or place to be achieved in the afterlife, but is in fact here among us, as Jesus proclaimed all through his life on earth.  One gets to it by love of God and love of neighbor, by living the love that God has so freely given us.  That is why living these commandments from our hearts is worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.  So love of God and love of neighbor, the heart of the Judeo-Christian life, needs to be the center of everything we think or say or do.  Love of God and love of neighbor needs to be the lens through which we see everything.

    So, friends, that means that we have to bring that lens with us to see the way through every interaction of our lives.  Not just the ones that are easy and joyful, but also the interactions that are frustrating and painful.  We have to love God and neighbor when the guy cuts us off on the highway; when the customer service agent puts us on hold for the fourth or fifth time; when we or a loved one get a frightening diagnosis and we have to navigate the healthcare system; when our coworkers drop the ball and make us look bad; when our children make poor decisions; when we disagree with a spouse or loved one; when a government official makes a terrible decision; and all the rest.  Then it’s time, not just to say “okay, whatever, that’s fine” but instead to make decisions and corrections and advocate for the truth and do what is right, but do it all with love and grace, and with trust in God’s love and mercy.

    The Liturgy of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the King of the Universe, which we will celebrate in a few weeks, calls on us to work with God to put forward, here on earth, a kingdom of love and peace, a kingdom of justice and truth.  You’ll hear that quote in the preface to the Eucharistic Prayer that day.  That’s what our life on earth is all about.  We truly are not far from the kingdom of God.  All we have to do is to love God, love neighbor, and enter in.

  • Friday of the Thirtieth Week of Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Thirtieth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    It could have been jealousy.  Or maybe they just felt threatened.  Either way, the Pharisees had lost sight of the mission.

    You could see how they would have been jealous: here they are working long and hard to take care of the many prescripts of their religion, attending with exacting detail to the commandments of God and the laws that governed their way of life.  But it is Jesus, this upstart, and not them, who is really moving the people and getting things done.  People were being healed – inside and out – and others were being moved to follow him on his way.  That had to make them green with envy.

    And, yes, they probably felt threatened.  The way that he was preaching, the religion he was talking about – well, it was all new and seemed to fly in the face of what they had long believed and what they had worked so hard to preserve.

    But how had they gotten here, how did they lose the way?  Because what Jesus advocated was really not a different message: it was all about how God loves his people and that we should love God and others with that same kind of love.  That message was there: buried deep in the laws and rules that they were so familiar with, but somehow, the laws and rules became more important than the love.

    The Pharisees wanted to preserve their religion and the way of life they had lived for so long.  Jesus wanted to make manifest God’s love, forgiveness of sins, and true healing.  It’s not that the rules of religion are not important, but the underlying message and the greatness of God cannot be overshadowed by legalism.  That is the argument in today’s Gospel; that is the argument that ultimately brought Jesus to the cross.  He would rather die than live without us; he paid the price that we might be truly healed and might truly live.  As the Psalmist reminds us today: Praise the Lord!

  • The Twenty-seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Twenty-seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    If you’ve been to any number of Church weddings, you have probably heard today’s first reading, and part of the Gospel proclaimed.  Obviously we usually leave out the part about divorce, but these readings are quite popular for weddings.  The reason, of course, is that the story is about how man and woman were created for each other.  The totality of the readings we have today, though, are challenging.  We do have that piece about divorce there, and it does present a challenge in these days when so many marriages fail.

    Jesus’ point here is that the Christian disciple is called to a level of faithfulness that transcends the difficulties of life.  We can’t just throw in the towel and walk away when things are difficult: marriage vows make demands of people – I say that in every wedding homily I give.  In the very same way, ordination promises make demands of priests.  We have to pray for the grace to be faithful in good times and in bad.  But sometimes it doesn’t work out that way.

    That being the case, I want to take this opportunity to make some points and dispel some myths about the Church’s teaching on marriage, divorce, remarriage, and annulment.  I do this because I know it is the source of pain for so many people, perhaps some people among us today.  It’s important that we all understand these teachings so that we can help one another live faithful lives and avoid making judgments about others which are best left to our Lord.

    The first myth is that divorce is a sin that excommunicates a person from the Church and does not allow them to participate in the life of the Church or receive the sacraments.  But divorce is not a sin in and of itself.  It may well, however, be the result of sin, and a consequence of sin.  Whatever led to the divorce, on either or both sides, may in fact have been sinful.  Those who are divorced, however, remain Catholics in good standing and are free to receive the sacraments including the Eucharist, sacramental absolution in the sacrament of Penance, and the Anointing of the Sick.  However, they remain married to their partner in the eyes of the Church and are not free to remarry, unless they receive an annulment.  Those who remarry without an annulment have taken themselves out of communion with the Church and then, and only then, are not free to receive the sacraments.

    The second myth is that an annulment is really just “Catholic Divorce.”  Annulment is instead recognition by the Church that a valid marriage, for some reason or another, had never taken place, because, for some reason, one or both of the parties was not free to marry.  These reasons may include extreme immaturity, a previous and undiscovered prior marriage, or entering marriage with no intention of remaining faithful or of having children.  Pope Francis added some other reasons a few years ago, including a fictitious marriage that enabled one of the parties to enter into citizenship, a very brief marriage, stubborn persistence in an extramarital affair, and the procurement of an abortion to avoid procreation.  In addition, Pope Francis somewhat simplified the process of an annulment in order to decrease the amount of time it takes to proceed.

    A third myth is that those who are marrying a non-Catholic who had been previously married are automatically free to marry, since the non-Catholic’s marriage did not take place in the Catholic Church.  But for the good of all, the Church presumes marriages between non-Catholics to be valid, so their previous marriage would have to be annulled before a Catholic is free to marry them.  This is a very often misunderstood principle.

    A fourth myth is that the Church always insists that the parties stay together.  Certainly, that is the Church’s preference: today’s readings show that the permanence of the marriage relationship is the intent of God.  However, we all understand that there are circumstances in which that may not be possible.  The Church would never counsel someone to stay together in a relationship that is abusive and puts one of the parties in danger.  That is completely unacceptable. If you are in an abusive relationship, whether the abuse is physical, verbal, or emotional, you need to seek help and safety.  The Church will support you in that decision.  If you find yourself in that kind of relationship, whether you are married or not, I want you to see someone on our staff immediately.

    Finally, there are some misconceptions about annulment proceedings that I want to clear up.  First, if you do receive an annulment, that does not mean your children are illegitimate.  The Church sees children as a gift from God, and thus never takes away their status as sons and daughters of God.  Second, people think annulments are too expensive.  They are not.  The cost of an annulment in our diocese is less than $1000, not the tens of thousands of dollars people had thought was necessary in the past.  And, under no circumstances will an annulment be denied if a person cannot meet those expenses.  Having said that, I always tell people that there are other costs in an annulment, most of which are emotional.  An annulment dredges up all sorts of things that may have been suppressed, and that’s never going to be painless.  But that kind of pain is part and parcel of any healing, so when you are in the right place for it, if you think your marriage was invalid, you should speak to someone who can help you begin the process.  That person is called a field advocate, and here at Saint Mary’s, that would be me, Father John or Father Ramon, and also Dr. Doug Muir, and Georgette Wurster.  Please feel free to speak with any of us, any time.

    What it all comes down to is this: we must all do what we were created for.  Relationships and vocations are opportunities to do that, but to be effective, we must choose to be faithful.  And we must choose faithfulness each and every day – maybe even every moment.  When life throws stuff at us, as indeed it will, we must choose to be faithful anyway.  But if brokenness destroys that grace, we should turn to the Church for guidance, reconciliation, and mercy. Just as man and woman cling to one another and become one flesh, so all of us are called to cling to God and become one with him. The Sacrament of Matrimony foreshadows the relationship that God has with the Church and the world.  We are all called to be caught up in God’s life and live forever with him.

  • Friday of the Twentieth Week of Ordinary Time [Mass of the Holy Spirit]

    Friday of the Twentieth Week of Ordinary Time [Mass of the Holy Spirit]

    Today’s readings (Mass for the school children.)

    I can’t think of any better way to celebrate the beginning of the school year than by giving a teacher a pop quiz!  You can all relax: I’m not really going to do that.  But that’s what is going on in the Gospel reading today.  The Pharisees are a group of the religious leaders in Jesus’ time who were very concerned that the law was being followed to the letter.  And today they approach Jesus, who they call “Teacher,” to ask him a question.  Now let’s be clear: the Pharisees didn’t like Jesus.  They call him “Teacher” in a kind of mocking sort of way because they had seen him teaching the crowds.  They were a little jealous, if they were honest, at how much the crowds were listening to him.

    Then they ask him what they think is a trick question.  “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”  Now, I think it’s important for us to know that this scholar wasn’t really interested in Jesus’ point of view, nor did he expect to learn anything from Jesus.  Instead he was looking for a wrong answer, for Jesus to say something that was against their way of thinking so that they could brand him as a heretic and get rid of him.  That’s what those Pharisees were all about.

    It’s important for us to know that, in the Old Testament, which was the Bible in those days, there are over six hundred laws!  So the Pharisees and the teachers and the scribes were always arguing about which of the laws was the greatest.  This question that the Pharisee asked could easily have gotten Jesus into trouble.

    But Jesus is too good for that.  So what he gives this scholar, and all those who were listening in, was a very fair summary of the law and the prophets: love God and love your neighbor.  And he does it in a way that they can’t argue about.  He does it by quoting one of their most famous rules of life, one of their favorite laws from Holy Scripture: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.”  Every Jew memorized that as the greatest and first commandment, so they couldn’t be uncomfortable with that answer.  And when he adds the commandment of loving your neighbor as yourself, well that wasn’t going that far beyond what they had been taught.  So now they have nothing to say to him.

    But what is important here is that these words are for us.  All of our life needs to be centered around love.  If love is what summed up the law and the prophets, then it is certainly what sums up the Gospel.  We too are called to love God who loved us first and loves us best.  We too are called to put that love into action by loving others, every person we come in contact with.  Some are easy to love, others not so much.  But we are called to love them anyway.

    And I really do think that’s a great thing to think about as we begin our school year.  We will all be friends with some people, and others might just be people we know when we see them.  Most of the time, I think we will all get along alright.  But sometimes, something might happen, or something might get said, and they we get hurt.  Then it’s important to remember what Jesus says in the Gospel today: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.  This is the greatest and the first commandment.  The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”

    We have to remember to love, because God loves us even when we aren’t so easy to love.  Even when we fall into sin, he loves us anyway.  So if God loves us that much, we need to love others just like that.  We need to love our neighbor, no matter who that neighbor is, no matter what race that neighbor is, no matter what part of town they come from or what their parents do for a living.  We have to love them when it’s easy to love them, and we have to love them when it’s not so easy.  Because our God loves us just like that.So think about this as you pray today: how will you love others today?  Who is hard to love?  What will you do to love them anyway?

  • Thursday of the Fourteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Thursday of the Fourteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Today’s readings reveal the power of God’s love in the world.  Joseph’s brothers didn’t realize they were, in fact, in the presence of the “dreamer” they had sold into slavery.  But his forgiveness of them shows that God’s love and providence overcome even the most grievous of sins.  Jesus sends his apostles out to preach, but without any of the things that one might think necessary: “Do not take gold or silver or copper for your belts; no sack for the journey, or a second tunic, or sandals, or walking stick.”  In this way, the apostles learned that, against all odds, the Gospel, the preaching of God’s love in the world, would bear fruit no matter what was lacking. 

    In our work and living and family life today, may we all look for opportunities to let God be God and show his love where he wants to.  Then we may look back one day and remark as the Psalmist did this morning: “Remember the marvels the Lord has done!”

  • Friday of the Seventh Week of Easter

    Friday of the Seventh Week of Easter

    Today’s readings

    “Do you love me more than these?”

    It’s a question that cuts to the heart.  Peter had just betrayed his friendship with Jesus and his commitment to the Gospel by denying his Lord not once, but three times: “I tell you, I do not know the man you are talking about.”  This is a poignant meeting of the two of them, the first time they have been alone together, since those words of betrayal were spoken.  And Jesus’ words to Peter in this moment are a mixture of comfort, challenge, and warning.

    So first, comfort.  And this might not looking comforting on the face of it.  Just as Peter had spoken words of betrayal three times, three times Jesus asks the question: “Peter, do you love me?”  Yes, the question cuts to the heart, but it is also comfort, because with each asking, Jesus is healing Peter from the inside out.  Healing never begins until the truth is spoken: “Yes, Lord, You know that I love You.”

    Then come words of challenge: “Feed my sheep.”  When we are forgiven or graced in any way, we, like Peter, are then challenged to do something about it.  Feed my sheep, follow me, give me your life, come to know my grace in a deeper way.  Never do we receive grace only for ourselves.  Grace is for us, but we are meant to grace others once we’ve received it. 

    And then words of warning: “when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.”  When we give ourselves over to God, that necessarily means that we might have to go in a direction we might not otherwise choose.  It necessarily means that we have to give up our own plans and follow God.  We have to let him take us where we do not want to go, so that we can be the ones we were always supposed to be.

    Jesus then summarizes all of it by saying “Follow me.”  No matter what we disciples have done in our past, no matter how many times we have messed up or in what ways, there is always forgiveness if we give ourselves over to our Savior and our friend.  If we follow him, there is mercy and grace and forgiveness – and challenge.  That’s the life of discipleship.

    Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

  • The Sixth Sunday of Easter

    The Sixth Sunday of Easter

    Today’s readings

    It’s interesting to me that some of the first things we ever learn about God are also some of the most foundational, most important things we learn about God.  One such notion is that God is love.  We’ve learned that, probably, when we were small children.  But theologically, it bears out and serves us well in our adult lives.  So I don’t know if you were counting or not, but between the second reading and the Gospel, the word “love” was used in one form or another eighteen times.  So it’s pretty easy to see where the Church is leading us in today’s Liturgy of the Word.  Love is a theme that runs through John’s Gospel and the letters of Saint John: John’s point is that the Gospel is summed up in that God is love, that foundational notion we learned when we were little children.

    Now we get all kinds of notions about what love is and what it’s not.  Our culture feeds us mostly false notions, unfortunately, and it gets confusing because love can mean so many different things.  I can say, “cookies are my favorite food – I love cookies!” and I think we can all agree that’s not the kind of love Jesus wants us to know about today.  When we say “love” in our language, we could mean an attraction, like puppy love, or we could mean that we like something a lot, or we might even be referring to the sexual act.  And none of that is adequate to convey the kind of love that is the hallmark of Jesus’ disciples.  All of these fall short of what Jesus wants us to know about love.

    So I think we should look at the Greek word which is being translated “love” here.  That word is agape.  Agape is the love of God, or love that comes from God.  It is outwardly expressed in the person of Jesus Christ, who came to show the depth of God’s love by dying on the Cross to pay the price for our many sins.  So that’s the kind of love that Jesus is talking about today; it’s kind of a benchmark of love that he is putting out there for our consideration.

    I love when my engaged couples pick today’s Gospel for their wedding Gospel.  Very often, they pick it because it sounds pretty and it says nice things about love, which are obviously pertinent to a wedding liturgy.  But I like it because it gives them quite the challenge!  To really see what Jesus meant by love in today’s Gospel, all we have to do is to look at Jesus.  His command is that his disciples – including us, of course – should “Love one another as I have loved you.”  And the operative phrase there is: “as I have loved you.”   Meaning, “in the same way I have loved you.”  And we can see how far Jesus took that – all the way to the cross.  He loved us enough to take our sins upon himself and nail them to the cross, dying to pay the price for those sins, and being raised from the dead to smash the power of those sins to control our eternity.  So the love that Jesus is talking about here is fundamentally sacrificial; it is a love that wills the good of the other as other.  And he says it rather plainly in one of my favorite pieces of Holy Scripture: “No one has greater love than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”  This sacrificial quality a vital property of agape love.

    And the disciples clearly were called to that kind of sacrificial love.  They were persecuted, thrown out of the synagogues, beaten for stirring up trouble, put to death for their faith in Christ.  Like their Savior, they literally laid down their lives for their friends.  That is what disciples do.  And so, we disciples hear that same command too.   Now, of course, we may never be asked to literally die for those we love, –although many in the world do that every day – but we are absolutely called on to die in little ways: to give up our own self-interests, our own selfishness, our own comforts, our own opinions, for the sake of others.  Love always costs us something, but real love, agape love, is worth it.

    So I think we should look for opportunities this week to love sacrificially, to love in ways that maybe we don’t do every day, ways that we may never do unless we think about doing them and make a decision to do them.  Doing a chore at home, or a job at work, that’s not our job and not making a big thing of it.  What might be important here is to not even call attention to the fact that it was we who did it.  Finding an opportunity to encourage a spouse or child with a kind word that we haven’t offered in a long time.  Picking the neighbor’s trashcan up out of the street when it’s been a windy day.  It doesn’t matter how big or small the thing is we do, what matters is the love we put into it.  When we make the decision to do something little for the sake of love, the joy we find in that act can help us to make it a habit of life, so that those little things become even bigger.  That kind of loving transforms families, heals past hurts, and can even make our little corner of the world a more beautiful place.  The love of God, agape love, offered most perfectly in the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross, transformed our eternity.  That same love of God, lived in each one of us, can transform our world.

    Saint Theresa of Calcutta once said, “I am not sure exactly what heaven will be like, but I do know that when we die and it comes time for God to judge us, he will not ask, ‘How many good things have you done in your life?’  Rather he will ask, ‘How much love did you put into what you did?’”  When we are constantly on the lookout for opportunities to love, there is no way we can miss the joy that Jesus wants us to have today.  “Love one another as I have loved you” might be a big challenge, but it absolutely will be the greatest joy of our lives.

    Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!  Alleluia!

  • The Easter Vigil in the Holy Night

    The Easter Vigil in the Holy Night

    Today’s readings

    Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!  Alleluia!
    ¡Cristo ha resucitado!  ¡Él ha resucitado!  ¡Aleluya!

    If anyone’s counting, this has been a very long Mass so far.  And I don’t mean just the blessing of the fire and the candle, the singing of the Exsultet, and the rather extended Liturgy of the Word that the Easter Vigil contains.  Yes, those are longer things, but we didn’t start this Mass with the blessing of the fire.  This Mass started back on Thursday, when we gathered for the Evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper.  The Paschal Triduum is one Liturgy, conducted in three parts.  During Mass on Thursday evening, we heard about Jesus washing the feet of his Apostles, and commemorated the night when Jesus gave us the Eucharist and began the Holy Priesthood.  We ended with adoration outside in the parking lot.  Then the Mass continued yesterday, on Good Friday, when we heard the Passion story from Saint John’s Gospel, we prayed extended intercessions for all of the people of the world and their needs, then we venerated the Holy Cross and shared in Holy Communion.  And then, we gathered tonight for what we are doing here.  This is literally the longest Liturgy of the entire Church Year, and there’s a reason for that.  The reason is that we absolutely cannot get enough of God’s love.  In these holy moments, God’s love for us is poured out in service to his friends, in sacrifice for us on the cross, and in the glory of the Resurrection which shatters the prison bars of death and opens for us the glory of eternal life.  That, dear friends, is love.

    This crazy three-day Liturgy stands in opposition to the simple-mindedness of our world and its pathetic understanding of what love is.  Our world takes love and makes it, at best, a cool feeling that lasts only as long as everyone is nice to each other, and at worst, something tawdry and unworthy of children of God.  But none of that is the love we receive in this Liturgy, that’s not the love that our God pours out on us, that is not a kind of love that has ever entered the mind of God.  This love, this real love, is caritas, a particular kind of love that is poured out in service to another, a love that seeks the good of the other as other.  It’s a love that meets the other where she or he is at, and then takes them to a place greater than could be achieved without this love.  This love breaks through the darkness of sin and death and calls us to life.

    The Exsultet, that long proclamation I sang when we came into church with the new Paschal candle, tells us of this transforming love.  It said:

    This is the night,
    when Christ broke the prison-bars of death
    and rose victorious from the underworld.

    Our birth would have been no gain,
    had we not been redeemed.

    O wonder of your humble care for us!
    O love, O charity beyond all telling,
    to ransom a slave you gave away your Son!

    We, friends, are that slave.  We are slaves to sin, slaves to the thirty pieces of silver and the Barabbas that we want more than life sometimes, as Father John talked about yesterday.  We are that slave, but God won’t have us remain in our slavery.  In order to ransom us from it, he gave away his Son, his only one, whom he loves, to use the words of the second reading tonight about God calling Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.  You see, there was going to be a sacrifice: but, it was never going to be Isaac, it was never even really the lamb caught in the thicket.  It was always going to be Jesus, and God’s love for us is so deep that he readily sacrificed his only Son rather than leave us to be slaves to sin.  Our life would have meant absolutely nothing, our birth would certainly have been no gain, had we not been redeemed by the death and resurrection of Christ our Lord.

    Quoting from the second line of the Gospel reading from Saint John that we heard on Thursday evening, Father Ramon reflected on this great love.  That line read: “He loved his own in the world and he loved them to the end.”  On Thursday, Jesus showed that love by washing feet and giving the Eucharist to be his everlasting presence until the end of time.  Yesterday he showed that love by suffering the passion and dying on the cross.  Today, we see that he showed that love by rising from the dead so that our own death doesn’t get to be the end of our story.  Indeed, Jesus does love his own, which includes all of us, and he loves us to the end, and that end hasn’t happened yet.  He loves us forever.  He loves us when we gather here to pray.  He loves us when we show mercy to others.  He loves us when we share the love he gives us with others.

    But, he loves us when we’re not at our best, too – he loves us when we are, in the eyes of the world, unloveable.  He loves us when we refuse to wash the feet of our brothers and sisters, when we refuse to be of service because we can’t be bothered with their problems.  He loves us when we take the thirty pieces of silver and call for Barabbas, when we do the wrong thing because we love our sins too much.  He loves us when we are at our best, but he loves us when we are at our worst, when we have participated in the “necessary sin of Adam.”  That sin doesn’t get to rule over us either, as the Exsultet proclaims:

    O truly necessary sin of Adam,
    destroyed completely by the Death of Christ!
    O happy fault
    that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!

    He loves us so much, too, that he calls us to live lives of holiness.  When we do that, we become like him, and we can be caught up in his life and live with him one day in heaven.  That’s what life is all about for us.  What we have here is nice, most of the time, but it’s nothing compared to what waits for us.  And because he loves us, he has always wanted us there.  In order to get us there, he has given us the Church to light the way through the darkness of the world, and the sacraments to give us strength in his presence.  Tonight, shortly, three young people – Carly, Adrian and Enrique – will be initiated into this life of love and grace by receiving the Easter Sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation, and the Eucharist for the first time.  For them, the stain of original sin will be destroyed completely by the Death of Christ, and because Christ broke the prison-bars of death, they will, with all the baptized, be able to be raised up to eternal life one day.  Saint Paul proclaims this boldly in our Epistle reading this evening from his letter to the Romans:

    If, then, we have died with Christ,
    we believe that we shall also live with him.
    We know that Christ, raised from the dead, dies no more;
    death no longer has power over him.

    Having, all of us, received the grace of God through the Passion of Christ and the cleansing of Holy Baptism, we then have work to do.  Having celebrated and been sanctified in this Vigil, we will shortly be sent forth to help sanctify our own time and place.  Because everyone must know that Christ is risen, that his love is eternal, that his grace obliterates our sin, that his love raises us beyond the grave, and makes us into disciples who are fit for heaven.  Earlier today, our Elect received the Ephphetha rite which called on God to open their ears to hear his Word and their lips to speak his praise.  In this Vigil, we all receive the call to Ephphetha, to make known the praises of our God.  That is our ministry in the world.  That is our call as believers.  That is our vocation as disciples. 

    May this flame be found still burning
    by the Morning Star:
    the one Morning Star who never sets,
    Christ your Son,
    who, coming back from death’s domain,
    has shed his peaceful light on humanity,
    and lives and reigns for ever and ever.  Amen.

     ¡Cristo ha resucitado!  ¡Él ha resucitado!  ¡Aleluya!
    Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!  Alleluia!