Fifth Sunday of Easter
Bishop of Lake Charles
Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception
May 2, 2010
Fifth Sunday of Easter
“Now is the Son of Man glorified.” John 13:31
Where do we learn to love? This is a question that no scientific analysis or behavioral analysis can satisfactorily answer. It is a decidedly human question with an equally human answer. When I say human, I am speaking of the animal that God created with its gifts and powers of intellect and will and most importantly an immortal soul. The question is best addressed by poets and theologians, by the lover and the beloved, by parents and children.
One of love’s fundamentals is its orientation to the other. Love moves us to embrace another. When love is directed to one’s self, then we call it narcissism. It is a distortion of what love should be, because love involves a movement outward of self. When someone directs that energy or power inward to self, then one grasps into air, because the self offers the self nothing in return. Love is the gift of self to another, and one cannot make a gift of oneself to the self.
Where do we learn to love? We learn to love from those who teach us by their love what love is. I think personally of the self-sacrificial nature of my parents’ gift to me. As I look back on my childhood, I am struck how they gave of themselves, never asking anything in return, always moving outward and giving to the other. This same quality I found in family, in teachers, in priests, and in friends. And while in our lives we can struggle with different manifestations of love, all true love is measured by the degree to which it makes a gift of itself.
When the Lord Jesus wants to teach us what love is He gives us two lessons. The first is found when Jesus gives the answer to the question, “Which commandment in the law is the greatest?” (Matthew 22:36). Jesus answers that the first is to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and quickly adds, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39). This love is fundamental, as I said earlier, because it requires going out of oneself to the other. We should love our neighbor no less than we love ourselves. As we feed ourselves, we should want to feed the other. As we cloth ourselves, we should want to cloth the other. As we preserve our own lives, we should want to preserve the life of the other. This commandment of love anyone can understand. It is a basic human love, but there is another definition of love in the Gospel.
The second lesson about love comes in today’s Gospel. Here Jesus is present with only His disciples at the Last Supper. To heighten the drama and to emphasize the lesson of love, Judas has just left this intimate group to work his betrayal. It is at this moment that Jesus teaches a second commandment of love. He says, “As I have loved you, so you also should love one another” (John 13:34). He says this to His disciples. This commandment of love is given to those who will call themselves Christian. This is Christian love. Only the Christian can love as Christ loves. To love as Christ loved is to define oneself as Christian. So, if the fundamental principle of love is to love the other as one would love oneself, then for the Christian the model of that love is Christ himself.
When I say I love Christ, then Christ transforms me. I embrace Him. He becomes part of me. Simply being a Christian is the imitation of Christ. It is in this sense that St. Paul can say to the Corinthians, “I urge you, be imitators of me” (I Corinthians 4:16). How could St. Paul be so presumptuous? It is only because the Corinthians are not to imitate Paul for Paul’s sake. They are to imitate Paul because, as he writes in Galatians, “I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). It is the Christ that lives in Paul, that Paul manifests “in the flesh” (Galatians 2:20), that the Christian is to strive to imitate.
There is an old scholastic principle that I think is operative here. It says that I become what it is I love. When I love another, in going out to that friend I strive to become what that friend is. For this reason, I want to know, to love, and to serve as the friend does. The same is true of our love for Christ. The only difference is that this love for Christ reaches down into the depths of our soul. This love certainly involves the intellect, our knowing and our coming to know who Christ is. However, the love of Christ has a more profound effect upon us than the love of a terrestrial friend.
In our love for Christ there is transformation. In loving Christ and striving to love Him more, this love appears endless. I think it was St. Theresa of Avila who compared it to a deep well. We never seem to reach the bottom of it. We go deeper and deeper, and it beckons us to continue.
I like to compare this love to a beautiful piece of music. Upon first hearing it, we are immediately struck by its beauty. It makes an impression on us, and we want to hear it again. The second and the third time we hear it, however, we hear the same music but some other facet of its beauty impresses us. We are drawn deeper and deeper into the melody, and we seem never to have enough of its beauty. We whistle it, we hum it, we ponder it in our mind. Time and time again it reveals more of itself. It is simply profound.
Our Lord invited us to that profound love. He knew that it was the only love that would unite His followers, a transforming love because it sought not the self but the other. To be united in the imitation of Christ would bring about the unity of the believers in His Church.