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Gospel Reflection 20070506

Following your conscience doesn't mean doing what you want!
Forming your conscience is described by religious thinkers as the process of educating oneself about what is right and wrong. It is developing a sensitivity to the goodness or blameworthiness of choices and a desire to make the choice for the good.
You have the responsibility to form your own conscience, to learn what is the responsible and loving choice in various arenas of life. It requires that you reflect within yourself, reach out to others to learn from them, check out what the Church teaches on the topic and place yourself in God's presence, asking for wisdom and insight in whatever matter you are trying to understand.

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Fifth Sunday of Easter
They Will Know Us by Our Faith & Works
May 6, 2007


Gospel
Jn 13:31-33a, 34-35

When Judas had left them, Jesus said,
“Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him.
If God is glorified in him,
God will also glorify him in himself,
and God will glorify him at once.
My children, I will be with you only a little while longer.
I give you a new commandment: love one another.
As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.
This is how all will know that you are my disciples,
if you have love for one another.”


This Gospel reading kind of reminds me of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. People in those days didn’t have radio or TV, had a few newspapers, which they read much more thoroughly than we do today. That’s all they had by way of communication and information. So they would readily walk 3 or 5 miles from the area around Gettysburg in order to hear the well-publicized address by the President of the United States. It was the dedication of a very large cemetery, dedicated to those soldiers who had fallen at the Battle of Gettysburg. They were ready for a great oration.
Abe Lincoln stood up to speak. “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought to this land a new nation – conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. We are now involved in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.” . . .
By that time, the speech was almost half over, but the people didn’t realize it! Then Wham! It was over! And some in the audience had just begun to listen! If they had been the least bit distracted, they missed the whole thing! “What a disappointment,” many thought. Yet, a reporter subsequently printed it, short as it was, and it was eventually considered one of the most effective and powerful speeches ever delivered.
Well, speaking of things being short, I timed today’s Gospel reading when I was sitting in my room the other day. I read it slowly, as if I were reading it to you today, and it took slightly more than 30 seconds. But as with the Gettysburg Address, the brevity belies its profundity. Don’t let the brevity of this Gospel reading fool you either.
These words were spoken by Jesus at the Last Supper, the night before He died. This was the night He gave us the Holy Eucharist, the perpetual Presence of His saving Death and Glorious Resurrection. And along with it, He gave the key to understanding it all. The key is what He called a “New Commandment.” – Love one another.
So what’s new? Love one another? Yes, but the measure of that love is what’s new: “Love one another as I have loved you.” This is extreme.
Extreme. There’s a lot of use of the word extreme these days. Like in sports: Extreme snowboarding; Extreme prize fighting. Extreme dirt bike racing. Etc.
This is extreme: “As I have loved you.”
Did you see the movie The Passion of the Christ? If you did, you saw a picture of extreme love. Total. Selfless. Jesus tells us today that’s what will show anyone who looks at your lifestyle that you are a disciple of His. In other words, that you are truly Christian. Putting this another way, look at the radical element of Christianity. The extreme element of Divine Love.
On this fifth Sunday of Easter, we’re basking in the mystery of the life and death of Christ as it is played out in the lives of Christians who take the Sunday Eucharist seriously. In the lives of people who give love not as the world gives, good as that may be. Not as the world loves, appealing as that love is. But as good as God loves. To this degree we are challenged to love God – and one another.
What does that say about married life? About family life? About my support of the Church? Of my forgiveness of enemies? About just every part of my Christian life?

In spite of all the declarations of love and affection for the significant people in our lives, we know that deep down, words are cheap. "Best friends" drift apart, parents and children are estranged, husbands and wives become adversaries in the courtrooms. The word "forever: has ceased to mean "permanent". It now means, "until it is no longer convenient," for me, or maybe even no longer profitable for me."

One day a presiding priest at a ceremony listened as the beautiful bride and a presentable bridegroom pledged their love for one another. Love certainly was in the air that day. In the apartment where he had stayed the night before the wedding, the last thing he heard before he drifted off to sleep, and the first thing he heard when he awoke the next morning was the couple next door bickering and shouting at each other. That really made him think. Wasn't love in the air the day they pledged their love to each other? What happened since?

"We kill the things we love", wrote one writer. Selfishness and loss of self-control do kill love, but the true lover does not kill love, he or she is ready to die for it.

Today, Jesus calls us to a love like His, calls us to a love like His Heavenly Father, and that call is a call to action. I ask you, which one of us would not die to save some member of our family, or even a very close friend?

In today's gospel, Jesus leaves his apostles with a new commandment. "Love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another." This command is fitting to stir up love in this Easter season. Why? Because Easter is a call to Joy and love is it's source. Then what is love? Is it a feeling? A mood? Yes, it is both of these things and far more. It is an indefinable mystery and a way of life. St. Paul, in his letter to the Romans, describes love as "sincere, hate what is evil, hold onto what is good, love one another with mutual affection."

Jesus' call to love is a call to action. If we live in Him, we will produce many good deeds. Our actions of life need always the guidance of the Holy Spirit, or they won't be actions from a love like Jesus' own. If not guided by truth, love is blind, as the saying goes. And you know what can happen to love when it is blind. We become capable of terrible things in the name of love. True love has the best vision.


It must have been distressful to look at the face of Jesus during the Last Supper. I refer not so much to the distress Jesus Himself felt before His impending agony and death (the apostles seem not to have understood, even then, that these were coming). Rather, I mean the distress anyone would experience at watching someone they love shift so quickly and dramatically from one feeling to another. The different Gospels convey any number of differing and even opposing feelings in Jesus: His deliberate confidence, His mortal sorrow, His tender love, His deep regret, and so on. On noticing this, one could not but be concerned for Him, anxious to understand what was happening in His soul, anxious to reassure Him. Yet, it is precisely in the midst of this inner, final preparation for the definitive battle between good and evil that He bequeaths to all His disciples some of the greatest gifts of His love: the Eucharist and the new commandment, to love as He has loved.
After the tense exchange with Judas, and after Judas’ departure, Jesus seems to heave a great sigh of relief. But it is not, I believe, because He could not bear the company of Judas. He speaks of glorifying God, of being glorified by God, of His departure from His friends and of His final command to them. Jesus knows that Judas goes to set in motion the final confrontation, and, fixing His Heart no longer on the genuine sadness He surely felt for Judas, He sighs with relief that, at last, the moment for which He was born had come: to glorify God in dying, and to be glorified by God in being raised from the dead.
This is what salvation means: we are restored by God, to God, in God. The paradise from which sin banished us is given back to us, through the flesh of Jesus, in the life of the Holy Trinity. That is why whatever we do for the least of our brethren, we do unto God. To love as Christ, does not just mean to imitate Him externally; that would be impossible if we did not have the free gift of that love actually in us. Christ invests us with His own love; that is why He can command us to love as He loves; otherwise, I repeat, we could never do it.
When we love as Christ, then, we glorify God (die for Him) and are glorified by Him (raised by Him). When we love as Christ, we die to the sinful self, and we are raised to the new, “life-full” and “love-full” self. It is in the true, loving encounter with Christ that every man discovers himself, knows himself, loves himself in truth. From the outside, Christian love may not look any different from effective social work, but inscribed deep within it is the very power of the death and resurrection of Christ, the very presence of the Trinitarian God. That is why Christian love, be it conscious or unconscious, transforms the world. Judas wanted Jesus to transform the world with a sword; but Jesus’ sword is His Cross, meaning His death and resurrection, and it transforms, not just the world, but the entire universe. Christian love is not ostentatious, it seeks not its own glory but the glorification of God in the one loving and in the one loved. But if I love as Christ, I will be loved by Christ, and God Himself will make His home in me. To know that home, I need to leave the home (the “comfort zone”) I would make for myself, and let God make my home for me. God’s dwelling place is with those who love as Christ, but such love is not possible without true death, which is not so much physical death as it is the renunciation of self. Selfishness gives way to “self-fullness”, a fullness which comes paradoxically from self-emptying, something possible only in the redeeming power of the love of Christ.
To the degree that each of us is open to Christ, others will know that we belong to Him, or as Jesus puts it, “this is how all will know that you are my disciples.” Talking about Christ is essential to evangelization, but it is the witness of Christian love which convinces. Christian love carries Christian truth from the mind to the heart; what is inscribed in the mind by concepts, is transcribed into the heart by Christian love. Certainly, we need to know our faith, and not just in terms of what we learnt as children. There should be a Catechism of the Catholic Church beside the Bible in every Catholic home; and neither book should look beautiful and unused. The Word of God in the Scriptures is guarded, preserved, explained and deepened by the Church in the Catechism. Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ; ignorance of the Catechism is ignorance of how the Spirit of Christ has led the Church to a greater understanding of the mysteries of Jesus through the centuries. So we must be generous and disciplined and heartfelt in taking time and making time to deepen our understanding of the faith. This is our right and our duty as Catholics, and no-one should consider it an optional extra. To be disciples of Jesus, how can we not want to know more about His teachings from the apostolic Church He gave us?
Yet, Jesus says clearly that all men will know we are His disciples, not by how well we quote the Bible or the Catechism, but by the fact that we love one another as He has loved us. Knowing about Jesus with the head is not necessarily knowing Jesus with the heart, although the more we learn with our minds, the more deeply we ought naturally to rejoice in loving Jesus Himself. So it is not a case of either being a disciple by learning or being a disciple by loving: it’s both (the usual Catholic solution!). One feeds and builds up the other. When all has been said and done –and it has to be said and be done- our glory and our judgment will be measured by how we have loved one another as Christ has loved us. God is glorified when man is in love – so long as it is in Christ’s love. When this happens, the universe itself rejoices, because man is fulfilling the purpose for which he was made. On the night He was betrayed, Jesus knew that the joy of God and of His beloved universe depended on His free acceptance of death. He despised the ignominy of the Cross and fixed His gaze on that joy which lay ahead. To keep us fixed on it, He gave us the Eucharist, the sacramental pledge of the glorious joy which we hope to be ours and He gave us the commandment of love which maps out day by day the pathway to salvation, in the midst of the sufferings and trials of our time.

Jesus gave his disciples this last and greatest commandment to love one another. Here is how to open your heart to embrace love as the ideal of the Christian vocation:
1. This Is How They Will Know You Are My Disciples.
Nowadays, words alone are empty; they need to be backed up by our actions. All too often we have experienced that zealous politician or marketer who makes promises that instinctively we know are too good to be true. We want to believe the good they promise, but experience has taught us to have a healthy sense of skepticism. Unfortunately, this contemporary disbelief of “too good to be true” could also be said of Christianity. Christians are to be known by their love for one another. In my marriage, with my children, and my social circle, am I known for my Christ-like love?
2. Love Has High Standards
An old Robert Redford film had a classic line: “Love is never having to say you are sorry.” As Christians, though, we are aware of our weak nature and tendency to sin. We need to ask pardon, and frequently. More than often, the souls we hurt are those closest to us: my spouse, a child, a parent or in-law. The disciples too had their squabbles with each other. The love that bound them, exhorted them to make peace with one another as Christ makes peace with his Church: “Father forgive them for they do not know what they do” (Luke 23:34). Is my love great enough to overlook the weaknesses of those who hurt me and turn my wounded ego around to compassion and pardon? To err is human but to forgive is divine.
3. Love Is from the Heart
Christ told his disciples, “Whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40). This applies as well to harboring grudges in our hearts. Love goes beyond kind words and actions to the very heart of man: our thoughts. Although it may cause initial violence to our will to think well of those who have hurt us, it is truly therapeutic! Our Lord said, “From the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, unchastity, theft, false witness, blasphemy” (Matthew 15:19). Likewise, a heart that actively looks for the good in others will form the habit of speaking well and acting kindly towards those who naturally are displeasing. Thinking well of others renews our faith in God’s mercy. If we are merciful, how much more can we expect Our Lord to be patient and merciful with us!


The first three Commandments: http://www.usccb.org/catechism/text/pt3sect2chpt1ind.htm "YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND"
Commandments 4 through 10: http://www.usccb.org/catechism/text/pt3sect2chpt2ind.htm "YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF"

posted by Mike Young @ 12:20 PM