Sunday of Week 6 of Easter (Year B)
Commentary on Acts 10:25-26,34-35,44-48; 1 John 4:7-10; John 15:9-17
The theme of today’s Mass is clearly love. When we see a film or television programme, when we hear people singing on the radio, the subject is very often about love. Even in the church, we speak frequently about love. What is love?
According to today’s Second Reading, the centre of all living is love. It is not only the centre of Christian living, but needs to be at the centre of any kind of life.
Our Christian faith should not be just seen as a religion, something tacked on to an otherwise secular life, which in most respects is the same as everyone else’s. Our Christian faith is a vision of how a human life should be lived in fullness. It teaches us how to be a real person. St Irenaeus said a very long time ago, “The glory of God is a person fully alive” (Gloria Deo homo vivens). And a person is only fully alive when full of love – because such a person then reflects best the God who is love.
What is love?
It would be well at this point to say what we mean here by the term ‘love’. The Greek word that John uses in his Gospel and in the three letters attributed to him is agape (Greek, pronounced ‘ag -ah-pay’). The Christian writer CS Lewis wrote a small book called The Four Loves in which he discusses four different ways of loving. The first of these is eros, which is physical love, the love of young lovers, the love of Romeo and Juliet. The second is philia, which in a way is the highest form of love. It is the love of friendship, is essentially mutual and shared, and touches every aspect of a person’s being expressing itself in a total transparency through intimacy and affection, and covers marriage and all other genuinely close relationships. To experience such a relationship is one of the great blessings of life. The third love mentioned by Lewis is prautés, sometimes translated as ‘gentleness’ or as ‘meekness’ (as in “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth”, Matt 5:5). It suggests someone who is unassuming, undemanding and totally submissive to what God wants, but also warm and caring.
Finally, agape describes a love which reaches out to others without expecting anything in return. Such is the love of God for his creation. God’s love is poured out in abundance on every single creature and it continues to flow out whether there is a response or not. This is the love which the father in the story of the Prodigal Son shows to the wayward son who has gone far away and wasted all his father’s gifts on a debauched life. It may come as a shock to some to be told that the love of God for the Mother of Jesus and for the most immoral person you can think of is exactly the same! God is love; it is his very nature; he cannot not love. What then is the difference between Mary and some depraved person? It is in the person’s response. Mary listened to Jesus. He once said, referring to his mother:
Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it! (Luke 11:28)
Mary said an unconditional ‘Yes’ to God at her annunciation. She opened her heart to the agape of God.
It is that love of agape which we, too, are supposed to have. It is this love that enables us to love our enemies and want to be reconciled with them. We are not asked to love them with eros or philia. That would not make sense. To love them with agape is to want the very best for them, to want them to reform, to be changed, to be healed of hate and negativity.
Where there is God, there is love
St Teresa of Calcutta (Mother Teresa) once said:
Where there is love, there is God.
She did not say, “Wherever there are Christians, there is God” or “Wherever there is a Christian church, there is God”. But, wherever there is a person filled with real agape-love for others, God is there. That is the meaning of the parable of the Good Samaritan. He was called “good” not because he was a religious person, but because he reached out in compassionate love for someone who was supposed to be his enemy. So we can find agape, and therefore God at work, in a Protestant, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Muslim. Maybe that person has no religious faith at all. He or she may be an agnostic or even an atheist. Wherever in the world there is truth, compassion, justice, true freedom and peace, God is certainly there.
What gives value to my life?
Perhaps I have been baptised, perhaps my family has been Catholic for a long time, perhaps I fervently go to Mass every Sunday, perhaps I carefully keep all the Ten Commandments, yet if I do not really love and reach out in solidarity to brothers and sisters, whoever they are and wherever they are, I do not have God’s life in me. Paul put it well when writing to the Christians of Corinth:
If I speak in the tongues of humans and of angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions and if I hand over my body so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing.
(1 Cor 13:1-3)
God loves me unconditionally, but that love is not fully realized in me if I am not passing it on to others.
One commandment
In today’s Gospel, Jesus does not say, “Love me, or love God as I have loved you”. No, he says:
This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
If we really love our brothers and sisters, including strangers and even enemies, we do not have to worry if we love God. But if we do not love everyone unconditionally, then there is no other way we can claim to love Jesus. We need to love those God loves (with agape) and God loves every single person without exception, even the most wicked.
So I do not really have to worry and ask, “Is it a sin to do, say or think such a thing?” Or, “Does the Church allow me to do this?” Rather, let me ask this way: “When I do, say or think such and such, am I really a loving person?” In one way, to be a Christian is terribly simple. I do not need to study in a university or an institute of theology. If I really love people as Jesus loves me, I will definitely graduate – with honours!
In practice, of course, it is not always so easy. We need to learn slowly how to love people unconditionally. Our lower instincts and the prevailing culture around us think differently. Yet we need to learn that the way of Jesus is in fact more in tune with our deeper nature. It is more human to be loving than hating (yet we often excuse our outbursts or anger or hatred as being ‘only human’). Deep down, we all want to love people. We do not like to hate people, and hating does terrible things to our minds and our bodies. We like people to be our friends and do not like them to be our enemies.
Yet, because of our past experiences, the influence of family and other people around us, the pressures of our society and our traditions, we often do not know how to love, do not know how to forgive, do not know how to be reconciled.
Love and commandments
The love that Jesus speaks about is very different from the love sung about in songs in music videos, or much (most?) of the love on TV and the movies. Sometimes when we love, we will be very happy. But sometimes loving the poor, the sick, the criminal will not be very easy. If we have to look after a relative who is close to dying, it can be a very painful experience, especially if that person is difficult or unresponsive to our attentions. But that is love.
Love is not a question of keeping rules and commandments. Love is a way of life. It is an internal attitude which influences every single thing we do and say and think.
The love of a Christian needs to be unconditional. Sometimes people will love us back; sometimes they will not. Sometimes, even though we want to love people, they may reject us. If they do reject us, we need not necessarily think that we have done wrong. When people cannot return genuine love, it is they who have the problem. All the more reason why we need to reach out to them. People often learn to love by being loved.
The most important thing is not that I am very clever, very successful, very rich, very famous… The most important thing is that I am someone who really loves. When I genuinely love others, there will always be some who do not love me back, but there will be others who will really respond in love. And it may be that my love has empowered them to be loving too. To be able to reach out in love and to experience being loved is God’s greatest grace.
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8 January – Reading
Commentary on 1 John 4:7-10
We move today into the third part of 1 John called ‘The Source of Love and Faith’. It is divided into two parts: the first deals at length with ‘love’ (4:7—5:4); the second is about ‘faith’ (5:5-13). Today John emphasises that the initiative for love comes from God and not from us. God does not love us because we love or obey him.
The word ‘love’ (Greek, agape) in its various forms occurs 43 times altogether in this letter. It is used no less than 32 times in the passages that begin today through verse 3 of chapter 5!
‘Love’ is one of the most used (and abused) words in our language. Our music lyrics use it all the time and there have likely been songs about love since the dawn of music. We use it in all kinds of other contexts too. People ‘love’ chocolate or they ‘love’ spending hours watching football on TV. People are ‘in love’ and they ‘make love’. And so on.
What, then, do we mean by love in our reading today? CS Lewis, the Christian writer, wrote a book called The Four Loves. There he describes four kinds, all of which should be part of Christian living. One of these is agape, the form of love that 1 John is talking about. A definition of agape that captures its essence is: “a passionate desire for the well-being of the other”.
This is the love that God unconditionally extends to all his creatures without exception. It is the love that each of us, too, is to extend to every one of our brothers and sisters—again, without a single exception. It is an outreaching love, an unconditional love. It does not depend on mood, liking or disliking. It is based purely and simply on the need and on the good of the other. It may or may not be expressed sexually, but it is definitely not the love (eros) that most of the pop songs are talking about.
No matter what we do, no matter how evil or vicious we are, God’s love for us remains unchanging and unchangeable. The old hymn (Love it was that Made Us) says it this way:
Love it was that made us and Love it was that saved us…
The reason is simple—God is love.
Love enters into his very being. God cannot not love—if he did, he would not be God.
It is strange to say (and for some it may be shocking), but God loves the most depraved person we could imagine and Our Lady or one of the saints in exactly the same way. He cannot do otherwise. Is there no difference then?
The difference between Our Lady and the evil person is not in God’s love for them, but in their response to the love offered to them. One person has a closed heart, while Our Lady, from the moment of the Annunciation, gave an unconditional ‘Yes’ which she never withdrew.
All our loving, then, is simply an opening of our heart, a return of the love that God has first shown us. When we reveal ourselves as loving persons, it is because God’s love is working in us and through us. The sign that we are loving him is also that we are filled with love ourselves, love which originally came from him.
As someone once said, God’s love is like electricity. God’s love is only in us when it is passing through us. It can never stop with ourselves. If we keep that love to ourselves, it dies.
The question then is not: Does God love the drug pusher? (He does.) The question is: Does the drug pusher love his brother? (If he does, he is certainly going about it in a strange way.) Anyone who is a deeply loving person to those around him is already full of God’s love. God’s love never changes, but it can be blocked by a closed heart.
God’s love is available in abundance to anyone who opens his or her heart to him. May I be able to do that. But that love, too, must continue to flow out beyond me to everyone I meet. It is impossible to separate God’s love for me and my love for others. We cannot have one without the other.
Our Christian life, then, is about being loving persons, not primarily about orthodoxy or theological expertise, or conformity to rules, or making sacrifices, or carrying out “religious” duties. As St Paul says in his famous passage in the first letter to the Corinthians:
…if I…do not have love, I am nothing. (1 Cor 13:2)
Today’s reading says:
Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.
If I am not a loving person, all the rest is a waste. If I am a truly loving person, everything else is taken care of. And what is the source of that love? It is not ourselves says John, but rather:
In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us…
The evidence is that God:
…sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Jesus hanging on the cross is the most dramatic sign of God’s love for us, a love that is totally gratuitous (so we call it ‘grace’) and never earned by any action of ours. Let me today look at Jesus on the Cross, say a big ‘Thank you’ to him and then go and pass on his love for me to everyone I meet.
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