Fifth Sunday of Easter ‘B’, IC 3:5;
A little platitude will serve
well for opening our sermon today: a man lives according to his loves. What we
desire, we pursue. That can be said of both good and wicked loves, of both good
and wicked people. And that why it’s so important for parents and teachers to
make every attempt to mold, shape and channel the driving desires of their
children in the earliest stages towards attaining good things. Once evil
affections enter in, they take possession and rule mightily by the power we
commonly call ‘passion’. Good desires too are motivating, and a love for Jesus,
inspired early on in life, can steer the course of all one’s days, landing him
in the place of eternal happiness thereafter.
If one’s cultivated love is
for what is evil we have the consequence of what Our Lord spoke where He said
that whoever commits sin is the slave of sin. It is the wish of Christ that we
should be free and happy. But if sin binds us to evils, certainly we will be
miserable. While no one in his right mind wants to be a slave, the devil uses
our immoderate desires to make war on us. Wayward desires of the flesh compel
one to seek gratification of them by every means in his power, regardless of
God’s law. Yielding to sinful desire, appetites of the flesh become stronger
while the will suffers from weakness. The great King Solomon of the OT, so
renowned for his wisdom, once a builder of the Jerusalem temple, had a tragic
flaw, for he became ensnared by his sensual passions for a pagan woman and
consequently left off building the temple to promote her pagan gods. This is
the pattern for those with evil leanings. Those who live for their base
passions have not hesitated to abandon their spouses, children, jobs, their
fortunes, and even to commit murder in order to satisfy their unlawful desires.
This then is a formidable enemy for humanity.
Although we were endowed with
an intellect to be able to ascend to the contemplation of God, yet sinful
indulgences make a man subject himself to base appetites to be incited and
directed by the devil. Ours is such a putrid moral climate, however, that we
don’t seem to notice the pervasive depravity around us. We’ve become accustomed to it. As a man loves,
so he lives.
I have spoken briefly thus
far about the love of evil. But there is another love, a true love based on
true good. And the chief of all the goods that Christians have is their union
with God. Our Lord used the familiar simile of the vine. Just how close can one
get to the Lord? The connected branch to the vine was our Lord’s way of
expressing it. It is a most appropriate image since He foreknew that he was to
take the form of wine (made from the fruit of the vine) in the Holy Sacrament
of the Eucharist.
The passage from the
Imitation today concerns the effects of divine love. It is in the form of a
prayer that petitions Christ to set one free from evil passions and to heal his
heart from disorderly affections. The object of this reformation is to enable
the soul to love Christ without impediments.
Here is an excerpt from this
segment, so typical of the phrases of its author:
Love
is a mighty power; it lightens every burden. The love of Jesus is noble and
inspires us to great deeds. It moves us always to desire perfection. Love
aspires to high things and is held back by nothing base. Love longs to be free,
a stranger to every worldly desire. Nothing is sweeter than love, nothing
stronger, nothing higher, nothing more pleasant, for
love is born of God. Whoever loves God knows well the sound of His voice. A
loud cry in the ears of God is that burning love of the soul which exclaims, ‘My
God and my love, you are all mine, and I am all yours.’
As a man loves, so he lives.
The thing that ultimately will make us saints is not the fear of God’s
punishments–although that can be very useful. It must rather be the desire one
has in his heart for God. A lover is prepared to accept every hardship and
bitterness for the sake of the one loved. The Scriptures today are appealing to
our higher aspirations in our Christian vocation. We should want to be people
who are in love with God.
It is that which should be the defining thing about how we live.