Our Set Up
Last Sunday we were told the need to remain connected to Jesus Christ as the true vine – the power source of our holiness and strength. Today, we are told how to use LOVE in this remaining with God, this abiding in His fellowship; this keeping on with Jesus in His Spirit.
How are we to maintain this connection through love? I have five dynamics of Agape love we should practice. Agape Love is Boundless Love. It is Sacrificial Love. It is Obedient Love. It is Friendship Love. And it is Fruitful Love.
Let’s glance at the 1st reading: the power of love carries Peter into the gentile family of Cornelius and we hear how the Holy Spirit goes forth to all there—as God is pouring out help to all of them—it’s Agape love—it’s not conditional love that only favors things a certain way of self. The second reading informs us that God’s identity is love. Love gives. Love brings a presence. Wherever there is love there is God and vice versa. The Gospel now presents us with the full dynamics of this ‘agape’ love. We Christians believe that Jesus is Love and we are meant to experience Him. He is the center and heart of all love. But “love” means so many different things to so many different people; For some it is just all about attraction (eros), For some it is all about family, blood or racial bonding (filia) but for us Christians it is all about how Jesus love moves within us, with a Spirit of sacrifice, deep care, giving, and a laying down of one’s will. Agape style may say “I need you because I love you”. Immature love says,”I love you because I need you “ Jesus discusses in today’s gospel the following 5 dimensions of agape love ;
1. BOUNDLESS LOVE ; The love that Jesus teaches us goes beyond mere biological or relational ties or special connections due to privilege. Society can fall into much favoritism and partiality and power positioning. Sometimes Jesus heard people make claims of such, but He surprised them by saying: ‘My mother and relations are those who hear the Word of God and keep it’, Matt 12:46 -50. He was saying: ‘Surely, Mary is my mother, and James is my cousin brother, but they are living in God’s love in my company, and it is their faith that they are now remaining close to me. For surely, I have close relatives that want to have nothing to do with me, too, but you don’t see me still working them into high positions with me. They love and believe little, so their faith is little. I am stirring up in humanity a boundless love, known and lived in the eternal realms already. Love is come down to earth in me, to bring you a limitless manner of charity.
Remember last Sunday’s message I gave about the fruits of the Spirit? The fruit of the Spirit is charity…. starts the list of 12 holy fruits!
2. SACRIFICIAL LOVE Jesus puts it this way in John 15 and John 16. ‘Greater love has no man than this that a man lays down his life for those he loves’. And can I add a retrograde inversion form (as musicologists will often say):‘Smaller love has no man than this that a man lays down his life for those he hates’. This is what we see each time we hear of terrorists who suicide bomb themselves into others —or those public random shooters who take out lives with no feeling, then take their own when there’s no escape of being caught. There’s no worse version of how to treat another human being than to cancel their lives to go with yours. All in hate. Jesus will teach Sacrifice in the schoolroom and text of a Cross. He is the opposite of such hate. We need His kind of love in our hearts.
3. OBEDIENT LOVE ; Christ says : ‘If you love me, keep my commandments’. St John says: ‘If you say you love him and disobeys his commandments, then you are a liar’, 1 Jn 4 : 20. ‘You are my friends’, says Christ, ‘if you keep my commandments’. Don’t say you love but then oppose me and go behind my back. Be out front with love, be disciplined in your love, and have self-control. The fruit of the Spirit is self-control, modesty, chastity…. We covered this last week in the homily. (See the blog)
4. FRIENDLY LOVE ; Christ also says : ‘You are my friends because you have known my motive’. Knowledge of the Will and the Word of God and alignment with this knowledge is one characteristic of agape love. The believers were first called ‘Christians’ in Antioch when people noticed this alignment to Christ’s teachings. We are friends with Jesus as we love everything about Him, even His challenging teachings, or His calling out a sin as a sin. “Go and sin no more,” he says to a woman, but first he loves and saves her, and offers the first genuine act of friendship they probably had ever know.
5. FRUITFUL LOVE ; ‘I chose you and commissioned you to go and bear fruits that will last’. Love is the most practical and effective tool of evangelization. A radio evangelist once said that : ‘People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care’. There was a person who gave a substantial gift of property to the Church, and it was secured in a will, of which the selfish children of inheritance expected to get. In the will it said: I never knew how wonderful Christianity was until I had to enter the Little Sisters of the Poor house for my elderly care. They showed me the beauty of the Catholic faith. They gave so much of themselves to me in my time of need. They loved me. They also had no idea of what fortune I had. But they did have an idea of how so very few times I was visited by my children in my last years and months and weeks and then days of my time on earth. My own kin could care less, even getting impatient with my life going longer than expected. In that extra time God gave me, I learned who He was by the example of such incredible Catholic single women—the Little Sisters. I saved them a bit from their usual begging routine, I bet. I gave back to them in a fruitful way, as they had done to me. The fruit of the Spirit is generosity, patience, kindness so I’ve learned and seen.
So there are the 5 Apape Style Love Patterns.
THE LOVE MANDATE
I can hear Jesus saying again and again to us his followers : ‘Love one another as I have loved you’. Let his own love be our pattern, motive and measure. It might have been Chesterton who put up this way: ‘Those who cannot love those who love them are the worst inept people. Like the Tin Man—pray for a heart! Don’t be hollow! Why put such conditions on love? Now, to the next level: Those who can only love those who love them are pagans ; as Jesus said. Yet Jesus aimed higher. Jesus wanted a love that could even meet hate with love back. You put me on a Cross; I forgive in love. One amazing sign of some Catholics to this world in convincing them of Jesus being real is this: The only people who can truly love those who hate them are the Christians ‘. This is the summary of what Jesus taught in his sermon on the Mountain, Matt 5 45 –48.
Chesterton concludes: (that)‘Christianity in most places cannot be said to have failed but just has not been tried’.They haven’t loved in Jesus enough. His reign of love is not yet found in them, until they surrender their will.
Hey! I hope Burtonsville will not fit that description, but that we’ll be known as a Catholic parish of people who have really tried to live in God’s love in Christ Jesus, via His Spirit of Grace flowing.
St John of the Cross reminds us that ‘At the evening of our lives, we shall all be judged for our love’. The highest principle of remaining in fellowship with Christ is to remain in his love.