5th Sunday of Easter C, 2007

There was a trendy song sung in many USA Catholic parishes in the late 1960s and 70s in the enthusiastic aftermath of the Vatican Council that had the refrain: “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.” Rather presumptuous, wasn’t it?–those of you who may recall it. It was but the beginning of a self-congratulatory manner of worship called ‘celebrating’ which has since taken on imposing proportions in many parish liturgies where the emphasis has come to center not on the worship of God but on the pleasure of those who ought to be worshiping. I couldn’t help recall this ditty upon reading this Gospel passage, so ingrained had the melody made its way into my memory. “This is how all will know that you are my disciples: if you have love for one another.”

It’s an odd thing, according to our way of thinking, to be commanded to love someone, anyone, everyone. Love is, to our minds, something that wells up within us spontaneously and naturally, a reflexive response to the presence of a person whose is perceived as good and desirable. We love what is delectable; love needs no further prompting than this. If one were commanded to love someone, we would say that this isn’t possible because love can’t be coerced or pretended. Yet Jesus ‘commanded’ us to love one another. It’s a thing to marveled about and our minds are unsettled in pondering it. The obvious thing to say here is that not everyone is loveable, nor even interested in our love. Some people are malicious, hurtful to us, obnoxious, or otherwise repulsive. We are reminded here of Jesus’ related command to love our enemies. The resolution of the difficulties involved in wanting to heed Jesus’ command must hinge, if not on the object–that is, on the persons to be loved–but on the sense or the meaning of love according to Jesus’ particular use of the word.

We should not fail to notice is our Lord qualifies the love He is speaking about when He adds: “love them as I have loved you.” Surely this is both a clarification and an added difficulty. Jesus nowhere in sacred Scripture indicated a love for his disciples that was sentimental or self-gratifying, a love based on personal ‘likes’. Rather, it was the opposite. He showed His love to those who misunderstood Him, who doubted Him, betrayed and killed Him. (So much for His friends.) The quality of Christian love for neighbor (that ‘love as I have loved you’) must then refer to something in the human will and not in the affections. Christ-like love gives, but does not calculate the returns; it centers upon wanting to give and not what pleases, pure and simple, but what is for another’s real benefit–even if that benefit is not recognized as such by the neighbor nor cherished by him. Jesus loves so that all might be saved rather than perish in hell. He therefore does not hesitate to make the requirements for gaining heaven very clear, even though they are difficult to achieve, and even unwelcome as means to that end. Such are the avoidance of mortal sin, practicing the denial of some lawful pleasures, praying persistently, developing good habits of acting, receiving the sacraments worthily, shunning worldliness, impurity and disobedience; helping the spiritually and materially needy, etc.

This love is of a sterling kind. It’s rare enough to be sure, but it’s a thing that can be done, that can be imitated in the life of Jesus and the Saints. We can love others–as Jesus loves them–in willing and in assisting them to achieve salvation. Mini-Christs is, I suppose, a way to express this love as embodied in a person. Here personal gain is set aside and likes and dislikes for people are not essential.

There’s a prayer known to many of you entitled the Act of Love which may help our understanding of the meaning of this commanded Christian love. It reads, in part: “I love my neighbor as myself for the love of You.” Here is a key to understanding the mysterious meaning of the love of neighbor commanded by Christ. Loving someone unknown to us, or someone unappealing, or even an opponent, can’t be done very successfully on a natural level. It requires a supernatural inspiration, a supernatural source of strength, and a supernatural goal in view for doing it. Loving ‘for the sake of Christ’ has moved martyred missionaries, medical workers, dedicated teachers, and even generous financial benefactors to great heights of charity because of the knowledge that they were serving Christ by these means.

How do we now stand in relation to this divinely imposed law of charity? I fear, not so well. Indulgence in sensuality has done us a great deal of harm, harm beyond that of making us readily disposed to commit sin. It has also made us highly sensitive towards and covetous of whatever may please our fancy and–in proportion–insensitive to the good and to the needs of our neighbor. Selfishness causes indifference over the welfare of others. We can’t spend ourselves being worried about someone else when we’re so preoccupied with ourselves. Moreover, concern about spiritual and moral goods, even when we are the ones gaining them, diminishes as we become lazier, softer, angrier, more impure, materialistic and self-otherwise absorbed: not a good manner of being for one who aspires to be a Christian.

I feel that we’re doing ourselves a great disservice in the way we are living and in the way we are de-forming our children by spoiling them, letting them have their own way, giving them all the technological games and gadgets and TV and Internet (with all their attendant moral dangers), and letting them listen to the base music that feeds their base passions, and further corrupting them with the inflated rhetoric of self-esteem that, ironically, so cripples their moral development. We becoming a spoiled generation and we’re raising children to outdo us in selfishness. We’re also discovering that, as a necessary result, we can’t manage to find love for our neighbor: a terribly lonely and unhappy state of being human, let alone being a Christian.

Our Lord asks of us a big thing in this Gospel. Singing a catchy tune won’t make it come about. Simulating the loving gestures of bear-hugs, casting sweet smiles, and distracting ourselves in worldly things won’t substitute for the discipline, the self-sacrifice, the mortification needed in order to love a neighbor ‘as Christ loves him.’ If this is difficult and yet demanded of us, there must be a great reward for accomplishing it. “We have to endure many trials to enter the kingdom of God,” the apostles said (2nd reading). Love of neighbor is not the least among such tests, such trials which prove that ‘we are Christians by our love, by our love.