HOMILY
FOR THE SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER
Listen on the Podcasts
"Whoever loves me will keep my word says the lord and my father will love him and we will come to him" (John 14 23).
The previous Sundays' readings spoke about the relationship
that God wants to have with us and the readings of the Sixth Sunday of Easter
speak about what God wants us to do in this world, His only command to love.
The word love denotes different meaning for different people, according to the
context and the relationship they are in.
When Jesus says love, it is much more than
what we think or feel or define. For Jesus to love is to give oneself. So, even
in the Gospels and in the Bible also we can find varied degrees of love. But,
Jesus calls us to reach the highest degree of love of giving our own life. In
the Second Reading from the First Letter of Saint John chapter 4 verse 10, we
find that in this is love not that we have loved God but that he loved us and
sent his Son as expiation for our sins. So, the prerequisite to loving is to be
loved. Because of the Fall in the garden of Eden, we lost that ability to love
as God desires us to love. One who loves, cannot be selfish. He cannot be self-centred.
He has to be other-cantered. When Eve and even Adam chose to eat that fruit,
they became self-centred. They closed the door of receiving that love from God
and also the door to love. And the coming of the Son of God, the Saviour, Jesus
opens that door again especially His death.
As I said, prerequisite to love is to be
loved. We need to be loved. A child who has never experienced the real meaning
of love, I think, that child can never love anyone. Because the child doesn't
know what love means. Because of that Fall in the garden of Eden, we lost our
real identity. What we do is the outcome of what we are. Therefore, to love we
need to be loved and we need to have that ability to love first of all we need
to experience the love of God. That's why, Saint Paul writing to the Galatians
would very beautifully write, "And the life I now live in the flesh I
lived by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me."
Saint Paul experienced the real love of the
Son of God who gave himself for Saint Paul himself. He says he gave himself for
me. Saint Paul had already personalized the love of Jesus in his life and he
had accepted that love for him and so he could do everything. That's why
writing to the Philippians he could say I can do anything in him who
strengthens me. It's not self-confidence. It is again God-confidence. It is a
total self-giving in the previous sentence of what I just cited the quotation
from Galatians chapter 2 verses 19 to 20. He would say, "I have been
crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who
lives in me."
It becomes possible only when, as Saint
Claire of Assisi would say, "We
become what we love and who we love shapes what we become." Still, the
quote is there, but I would like to just focus on this one sentence. Jesus
became human. He became man; because, He loved us. His love for us made Him
what we are, humans, man. Then St. Clare would continue to say, "If we
love things we become a thing. If you love nothing we become nothing. Imitation
is not a literal mimicking of Christ, rather it means becoming the image of the
beloved, an image disclosed through transformation. This means we are to become
vessels of God's compassionate love for others." So, true love means
becoming like the beloved. We are called to be an image of Christ in this
world.
To be Christian is to be Christ-like, to be
another Christ, to be the vessel of Christ, to be a carrier of Christ. In other
words, we can say, a Christian is one who has surrendered himself, given
himself - his body and his very life to Christ, for Him to live through the
person, as we have just seen from Saint Paul's letter to the Galatians,
"It's no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me". Then only,
it is possible to love. Otherwise, it would all remain to do some favour for
others, that would only inflame the person or it would boost the self-image of
the person; but it would not mean real love. In the Gospel of the day, Jesus
says, "As the Father loves me so I also love you. See the kind of
relationship, the love that Jesus expresses towards us. "As the Father
loves me so I also love you." What kind of love is that?
If you study deeper this reality, the
mystery of the Holy Trinity, we would find that love means self-giving. It's
not a feeling. Actually, love is not the feeling that we would say. It's
giving; it's self-giving. The Father gives Himself, empties Himself into the Son,
and in return, the Son receives the Father and empties Himself. So, there is a
cycle of giving and receiving, giving and receiving is going on and on and on.
That process can never end and Jesus says, "As the Father loves me so I
also love you". Then He says, "Remain in my love". To remain in
the love of Jesus, Jesus says, "Love one another". To remain in the
love of Jesus, we need to keep His commands. In St. John 15 verse 10, He says, "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. So, to remain in the love of
Jesus, we need to do what He commands us. And what is his commandment? In verse
12, He would say, "This is my commandment love one another as I love
you". See, as Jesus loves us, we need to love one another. That's when, in
the beginning itself, I said the prerequisite to love is to have experienced
love, to have been already loved by God. So, before we think of loving, we need
to accept and personalize the love of Jesus, God emptying Himself.
That's why the Most Holy Eucharistic
Celebration is the centre of Christian Life. We would experience God emptying
Himself and giving Himself - His Body and Blood to each one of us, and there we
are invited to experience that love by receiving the Lord into our life, into
our body, and to become one. That's what St. Clare of Assisi would say, as I
had cited earlier, "It is a transformation". We are being transformed
into the image of the person of Jesus. Then we would become like Jesus. Then we
would let Jesus live through us, as Jesus let the Father live and work through
Him. That's why always He would say, it’s not I live here, it's not what I want
I do; no, I do what the Father wants. Jesus did and lived every moment of His
life as the Father wanted Him; because He loved the Father. So, the same love
has to be seen in and through our life. And that is impossible, unless we let
ourselves be loved by God. We need to allow ourselves to be loved by God. Very
often, we want to do great things for God; but, that is impossible. God doesn't
want great things from us, as Saint Mother Teresa of Kolkata would say,
"God wants us to do simple things with great love."
Mother Teresa got that great strength to be
the image of Jesus in this world from the Holy Eucharistic Celebration and also
from her Adoration of the Holy Eucharistic Lord. The same Lord whom she
received she adored the Most Holy Eucharist. That was the centre of her life.
Then, we would become as Saint Paul writes to the Corinthians in his First
Letter chapter 13; the entire chapter says about love or Saint Paul writes
about love. In this chapter, we can find qualities or characteristics of love.
Love is patient; love is kind. It's not envious, not boastful, not arrogant,
not rude, but, it bears everything, believes everything, hopes everything, and
endures everything. Let's ask God, first of all, to let ourselves into His
hands which is a challenge - letting ourselves into the hands of God to be loved
by Him as we are. And once we realize how precious, how important we are to
God, we would let Him live and love through us. May God give us this grace.
No comments:
Post a Comment