6th. Sunday of Easter
(B)
(Acts 10:25-26, 34-35,
44-48; 1st. John 4:7-10; John 15:9-17)
Today we have heard much about fraternal charity in our
readings. We know, of course, that Jesus
said it was second only to love of God; indeed, when asked, He said that it
could not be separated from love of God:
“Teacher, which commandment in the law
is the greatest?” Jesus said to him, “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 neighbour as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on
these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:36–40)
However, fraternal charity is so frequently, easily, and even
flippantly, bandied around in our modern society that it is often popularly
regarded as the main, characteristic, teaching of the Christian faith,
relegating love of God to something vague, unappreciable, and ultimately
unimportant; with the result that, as you are well aware, monks and nuns who
dedicate their whole lives to the worship of God in solitude and seclusion are
often enough said to be wasting their lives, which would be better spent in
doing good to people. Contemporary
society, being very much influenced by scientific enquiry, consequently likes to
think that it can indeed, test, prove, manifest and boast of chosen acts of
charity to others in need; but who can show, who can prove, demonstrate,
love of God?
Despite such popular misconceptions, however, there can be no doubt
that love of the Father is first and foremost in Jesus’ own life and in His will
for us; and we, His disciples, must learn to take care in our dialogue with the
world and in our zeal to stand up on behalf of, or proselytize for, the Faith,
that we do not – so to speak -- joust with people proffering mere arguments, by
the use of words made holy by the faith they express; that we do not gradually
come to accept the premises on which all the actions, thoughts and words, of our
adversaries are based: the scientific reality of this physical world and
the exclusive worthwhileness of the hopes and expectations it seems to hold for
them.
Our blessed Lord Jesus gave us His disciples -- at their express
request -- the prayer we call the “Our Father”. In it we pray, first of all, to the Father,
for His glory and for the coming of His Kingdom: the now inchoate, but to-become
ultimate spiritual reality for us, on which all our thoughts and
aspirations, words and actions, must be based; and to that end Jesus seeks
to lead us, first and foremost, into a truly real and personal relationship with
the Father. The second part of the
prayer He gave us is not directly for the world and our life in it, but
for God’s family, of which we have chosen, and are privileged, to be a part,
emphasising and cementing our oneness in charity with our fellow disciples, each
and every one of whom is our brother or sister in the Body of Christ and the
family of God.
In
today’s Gospel reading, Jesus tells us the meaning of His life on earth when He
says:
I have kept My Father's commandments
and remain in His love.
Likewise, He wills that our life as His disciples should have the
same meaning and purpose as His, and therefore He says:
By this My Father is
glorified, that you bear much fruit; and become My disciples.
And the ultimate joy of His life, and of ours too if we abide in Him,
is the fact of the Father’s love:
The Father loves Me; I
have kept (His) commandments, and abide in His love.
Love of the Father is indeed the first and the greatest commandment;
it is also the supreme reward and deepest joy of the Christian life of faith
even here on earth.
What then is the special significance of the great emphasis given
today, especially in the Gospel and letter of John, to love of neighbour? Let us recall part of that
letter:
Beloved, we belong to God, 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. In this
way the love of God was revealed to us: 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. (1 John 4: 5, 7-10)
John’s whole aim there is to show that love, true Christian love,
originates with, comes from, and must involve, God the Father. Such love is of God’s very essence. Those words teach us that Christian love –
caritas -- is only bestowed, exercised and shared, in God, and among those who
already belong to Him and/or are open to Him.
John is writing in his letter to fellow Christians when he says,
‘Whoever is without love does not know God’.
There he is saying, ‘You who claim to be followers of Christ, Christians,
adopted sons and daughters of God in Christ by the Spirit, cannot be such without love,
God’s love, caritas, being in you and among you’. And in his Gospel from which our principal
reading was taken, the words of Jesus were addressed to His chosen future
Apostles at the Last Supper, not to the generality of the Jews or even of
His numerous followers. Fraternal love –
caritas -- among Christians is a most intimate aspect of their love for and
response to God.
The world has gradually taken over those initial words out of their
original context and come up with a parasitical likeness, ‘everyone who loves –
not, of course, in God’s way, because there is no God – but everyone who “loves”
in our emotionally acceptable way, that is, unfettered by any religious
considerations demanding our obedience, such a person is truly good in our
eyes.’ It is doing the same with other
Christian words, especially key words such as ‘marriage’, ‘conscience’, and
‘sin’.
Because it is essentially divine love, caritas-charity can only
become part of our lives as a gift -- the very Gift of the Holy Spirit Himself
-- from God. The fact is, that just as
worldly society knows nothing about divine holiness, so too, of itself, it knows
nothing about true love, divine love.
Proponents of modern society can and do use words learned from centuries
of Christian teaching, but the realities signified by those words are unknown to
them, lost by their rejection of God Himself.
We can see evidence of this every day around us: our respectable and
politically correct society identifies love with sentimentality or emotionalism
and passion, with the result that many parents actually harm their children by
the ‘love’ they mistakenly show them.
Again, the majority of worldly pleasure-seekers proclaim, as their
pleasures show, that love -- for them -- means the shared pleasure of any and
every sexual passion; which, being separated from and independent of any moral
law, inevitably brings harm, first of all, to themselves.
The Christian revelation, however, teaches us that only God, only
Jesus, can tell us what is an authentic expression of our divinely created
nature, and of God‘s love being in and acting through us; and John, in our
readings today, insists in the name of Jesus, that one, decisive, sign of the
authenticity of our love for the Father, is His Spirit of love being active
in us, and leading us to love our neighbour as He would have us do. For He is the Spirit of Holiness, given to
lead us to holiness of life and love in God, and our supreme mission in life is
to let Him lead us and form us in Jesus for the Father: in that way we keep
God’s commandments.
And in order that He, the Spirit of Jesus, may be able to thus work
in us and form us in the likeness of Jesus, we must humbly and patiently
endeavour to:
Love one another, just
as He, the Lord, has loved us and commanded us.
However, just as the origin and nature of Christian love is divine
caritas, so too its end is divine: we are called to love our neighbour in
God, we are called to care for his or her good in and before God. We are not thereby called to publicly
acceptable manifestations of human love and liking, but we are called to care
for and promote, if possible, our
neighbour’s well-being in and before God, that is, according to his or her need
and in accordance with the commandments of God our Father Who is the supreme
lover of all. Such being the case, just
as there is never a time when, never any circumstances where, we can absolve
ourselves from loving the Father, so too, there can never be any people,
with regard to whom, we can absolve ourselves from the obligation of such
fraternal charity.
People of God, we can never be sure of the authenticity of our own
personal love for God, nor can we ever be sure of the true nature of our love
for our neighbour: we like to think we know ourselves, but we are aware that
people are not always either able or willing to recognize the deep desires that
motivate their actions or attitudes, and we must also acknowledge and confess
our own personal weaknesses and ignorance.
That is why some commands
from God are necessary for us, being totally independent of our own selves and
selfishness. And here today we know that
we can be sure of the authenticity of our love for God, if, and to the extent
that, we try by the Spirit to love our neighbour as Jesus wills, for the greater
glory of the God and Father Who calls us to become His adopted and beloved
children.
