Homily: 6th Sunday of Easter - Greatest Love Story Ever

Over the last eight weeks we’ve had Laetare Sunday, Palm Sunday also called Passion Sunday, Easter Sunday, Divine Mercy Sunday, and Good Shepherd Sunday. Last week, we might’ve called “Vine and Branches Sunday”.  This week we could call “Love Sunday”.  For, in just the second reading and the Gospel, the word “love” is used 17 times.

Love is at the heart of the Christian faith.  When I am preparing couples for marriage, I ask them a series of questions about themselves and their relationship.  ’ ‘How did you meet?’ ‘When long have you dated?’ ‘What kind of interests and activities do you share?’ ‘What values or lessons from your parents do you hope to put into practice in your own marriage?’ ‘What do you want to do differently?”

The toughest question perhaps is a true or false question.  ‘True or false,’ I ask. ‘Love is all you need for a happy marriage.’  Is love all you need for a happy marriage?  Some of them think it is a trick question, and they try looking at my face to see what answer I want. 

Is love all we need, as John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison sang?  The answer really depends on our definition of love.  Sometimes we use the word love to mean a lot of things.  We say, I love ice cream, I love classical music, I love summer, I love bacon, I love the Cleveland browns, which is like saying I love suffering and tragedy; but that goes to show you, the word love has many meanings.

Even many of the great love stories in literature are very confused about the notion of love.  I remember back in high school reading Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” great love story.  Yet, really…is that love?  A 3 day teenage romance that caused 6 deaths?  Romeo decided that he loved the 13 year old Juliet before even talking to her, and married her two hours later.  Are raging teenage hormones the same as love?  Is this sort of irrational impulsive selfishness the same as love?

Up until 2009, with the release of the movie Avatar, the top grossing movie in the USA was a love story—the movie “Titanic”, raking in over 650 million dollars, world-wide in brought in 2.1 billion dollars.  Dreamy Leonardo DiCaprio played a poor boy named Jack and Kate Winslet played upper-class Rose.  And in this story, Jack and Rose, coming from two different worlds socially, meet and “fall in love.”  Titanic is a really interesting story for many reasons, the ship is like this microcosm for the world.  Jack and Rose fall to the sound of a celine dion soundtrack: amidst intrigue and conspiracy, tensions between rich and poor, celebrations and dancing; night and day.

And then the romance turns to tragedy as—spoiler alert –on her maiden voyage the ship hits an iceberg in the northern Atlantic and begins to sink.

This movie was really popular all those years ago back in 1997, especially among girls between the ages of 13-18.  They didn’t just go see the movie one or two times, they went to see it 4, 5, 6, 7 times. 

There was a survey done about why these young girls went to see this movie so many times.  You may be surprised…It wasn’t because they really liked boats.  And, It wasn’t because they had the hots for Leonardo DiCaprio—after all he was in a number of films before and after Titanic which didn’t make a quarter of the money. 

So what why was Titanic so successful?  In the end, it was a movie about two unlikely people falling in love, and when the chips were down and the ship is sinking, jack is in the freezing water, and making sure that Rose is safe up on the floating plank, and jack begins to slip, and she is calling out his name, and she’s weeping, and every girl in the theater is weeping, her heart is being torn out, because it is a story about a man who sacrifices his life for his beloved, and after 4 ½ hours, we were pretty emotionally invested in these characters.

After Titanic came out in 1997, Carnival cruise stock flew through the roof, ironically. All these people saw a movie about a sinking ship in the middle of the atlantic, and their first thought was, I have to go on one of those.  No, they wanted the opportunity to meet someone who would love them as Jack loved Rose.  Willing to drown in freezing water so that the love of his life would live.

“There is no great love, than for one to lay down his life for his friend.” The Lord Says.  Titanic captured that, and became hugely successful.

Yet, neither Romeo and Juliet, nor Titanic, nor half-dozen movies where Meg Ryan falls in love with Tom Hanks, are the greatest love story ever told. The story of the Christian faith is better than any story by Shakespeare or Hollywood, for our story is true. And when Christ layed down his life for us, he did, not just to entertain, to fuel our emotions, but to save our souls.  And by doing so, He became the model par excellence of how we are to treat one another.  “As the Father loves me, so I also love you.”  Romeo and Juliet’s impulsive romance is not the love we are called to emulate, rather, it is the love Jesus Christ has for God His Father, that is to beat within our breasts.

Pope Benedict XVI wrote some of the most beautiful words about Love in his first encyclical titled, Deus Caritas Est, God is love.  He wrote, “Love is possible, and we are able to practice it because we are created in the image of God. To experience love in this way is to cause the light of God to enter into the world.”

Love is possible.  On this Mother’s Day, our minds and hearts are directed, as they should be, to the love of our mothers, who are often our first teachers in the lessons of love—their self-sacrifice, their dying-to-self, enables new life to flourish.

Yet, at the heart of the Christian faith is a love even greater than the love Mothers have for their children.  “In this way the love of God was revealed to us” St. John wrote, “God sent his only Son into the world so that we might have life through him.”  We are loved so immensely by God, that he was willing to leave paradise, become man and die for us, that we might be with him in paradise. 

Jesus in the Gospel today said, “remain in my love.”  We remain in his love by keeping his commandments.  When we do not keep God’s commandments we fail to love God as we should.  Yet, love of God is truly meant to fill us, like fuel for an engine.

Our hearts cannot catch fire with God’s love, if our hearts are never brought close to his.  Perhaps, for many the Christian life is so dreary because it lacks the sort of heart-to-heart contact with God, that every Christian is meant to heave on a daily basis.  And that is to happen in our daily prayer.  Daily prayer is more than rattling off an Our Father, if you remember…Daily prayer is meant to be a bringing of your heart near to the fire of God’s heart, so your heart can can catch fire with love of God?  Many of us, are, perhaps afraid of falling head over heels in love with God, because we know we’d have to change our ways out of respect to our beloved.  But it is precisely that life-changing encounter with God’s heart, that will bring us the joy we so desire.  Our Blessed Lord in today’s Gospel says, ““I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy might be complete.

As we continue this celebration of Holy Mass, in which the Lord sacrifices himself for our salvation, may our hearts be ever more opened to the love God has for each one of us, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.