6th Sunday of Easter 2023 - Selfless, sacrificial, and unconditional love (Mother's Day)

 

Throughout the Easter season, we read each sunday from the Gospel of John. Six weeks into Easter now,  we’ve read St. John’s account of the Risen Lord appearing in the locked room, and showing the signs of his crucifixion—signs of his love—to the apostles. We then read the risen Lord’s appearance to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, setting their hearts on fire with love as he explained the scriptures and broke the bread. We then read St. John’s account of the Lord’s teaching that he is the good shepherd who lovingly lays down his life for his sheep. Do you see a theme emerging? Love overflows throughout the easter season.

Today’s Gospel was another beautiful message from St. John’s gospel about Love. At the Last Supper, St. John reports over and over the Lord Jesus teaching his disciples that their lives must be characterized by love, we must practice love. Love of God. Love of Neighbor. Love for your fellow Christian. Love for your enemies.  

The Gospel of John is referred to sometimes as the Gospel of Love, for John’s Gospel finds Jesus teaching about love, speaking about love, commanding his disciples to love.  He shows us signs of love, he sets hearts on fire with love, he lays down his life in love. This is how they will know that you are my disciples, that you love one another. 

St. John stresses throughout his Gospel that Jesus’ actions are manifestations of God’s love for us. Jesus makes known the love of God. Jesus himself tells us that he loves us. “I love you” are on the very lips of Jesus himself: “as the Father loves me, so I love you.” 

Augustine said, “What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.” God’s love is made known by the hands of Jesus, the feet of Jesus, the eyes of Jesus, the ears of Jesus. And our hands, and feet, and eyes, and ears are to become instruments of God’s love as well, as we hand our lives more and more over to the call to “love one another”. 

In St. John’s original Greek version of today’s Gospel, the word translated as “love” is the word agape, which you’ve likely heard is one of a number of words the Greek’s used for love. Agape is not simply brotherly affection, or even the love between really good friends. It is more than the loving loyalty the patriot has toward his country or native land, nor is it the romantic, emotion-driven passion of lovers that ebbs and flows depending on mood. Rather, agape is the highest form of love: selfless, sacrificial, and unconditional. 

And the Lord says, that’s the type of love we are to cultivate toward God and toward our fellow man and Christians. Selfless, sacrificial, unconditional love. For this is the love that God has toward us. God is love, St. John tells us.

Today, we celebrate Mother’s Day, the beautiful loving souls of our mothers. And for many of us, our mothers are our first real encounter with love, our frame of reference for love that is selfless, sacrificial, and unconditional. Our mothers loved us in the womb; they loved us as we cried to be fed and changed as infants. They lovingly tucked us in and sang us lullabies and calmed our fears when nightmares disturbed our sleep. They showed us that love is patient and love is kind, when as children we surely pushed the limits of patience and kindness. Our mothers lovingly corrected us when were selfish and misbehaved and required motherly discipline. 

Our mothers showed us that love comes in many forms: love comforts, it feeds, it corrects, it weeps with those who weep, it nurtures, it teaches, it embraces hard days and sleepless nights.

If human love is always a reflection of God’s love, then our mother’s love is one of the most clearest and brightest reflections. One might say that God’s love for us and a mother’s love for her children are intricately woven. Mothers show us what love looks like. 

God gave us mothers to love us, so that we might be able to grasp his infinite love for us, and how we are to love Him and love one another. Our mothers are our first teachers that life is better when we practice love. 

Love of God is the key to following all of the commandments. The Lord says in the Gospel today: “Whoever has my commandments and observes them, is the one who loves me. And whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him." Why should we follow the commandments and spend ourselves in service and seek to forgive and give to the poor? Because we love God and want to please God.  God is supremely loveable and therefore His commandments supremely right and just.

The love of God transforms us from the inside out. Love of God enables us to suffer wrongdoing patiently, to be kind to those who slander or mock us. Love enables us to overcome jealousy, pride, rudeness, and every earthly attachment. It enables us to bear all things,  believe all that the Church teaches, hope in the promises of Christ, and endure every trial. Love never fails.

The saints show us what agape-love is capable of doing. Agape turns selfish troubadours like St. Francis into great champions of love. It makes simple peasants into doctors of the Church who counsel kings. It enables us to be delivered from resentments and hurts from the past. It turns fishermen into globe-traversing preacher-martyrs.

It makes ordinary people like us into extraordinary instruments of grace for the kingdom. It makes us not just hearers of the word, but doers of the word.

Pope Benedict, in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, writes: “Love is the light—and in the end, the only light—that can always illuminate a world grown dim and give us the courage needed to keep living and working. Love is possible, and we are able to practice it because we are created in the image of God. To experience love and in this way to cause the light of God to enter into the world.

Our world is in desperate need of Christians bringing the light of God into the dark corners of society. Just this morning, I saw an alert, that there were three homicides in Cleveland in the last twelve hours. We can be certain, that the perpetrators of these crimes have allowed loveless darkness to fill their lives. This city is in desperate need of Christians bearing the light of the love of God. No one else will do it. No one else has been tasked to do it, but us.

2nd Week of Lent 2022 - Wednesday - Sacrificial Love and the Lenten Program

 Three times during Matthew’s Gospel, the Lord tells of his forthcoming Passion and Death 

The first foretelling of his Passion immediately follow’s Peter’s Confession that the Jesus is the Messiah, Son of the living God. 

The second foretelling comes after the Lord’s transfiguration and the healing of the demon possessed boy.

The third foretelling, which we heard today, precedes the request for James and John to sit at the right hand of Jesus in the heavenly kingdom.

In each of these three cases there is some revelation—some insight into Jesus’ identity, along with the news of his Passion. He truly is the Son of the Living God, as Peter asserts. He is glorious divinity as is seen on the mount of transfiguration and the one to overthrow the powers of the devil as he does when he descends the mountain. And he is the one to sit on the throne of heaven, as James and John’s mother rightly claims.

But Jesus shows that divinity is not about power, wealth, and fame, it is about love—self-sacrificial love. God loves us enough to take on the our humanity, and to suffer—to be handed over to the Gentiles, to be mocked and scourged and crucified. It is by willingly embracing sacrificial love that demons are cast out, that death is destroyed. Sacrificial love is sanctifying love—divinizing love. By it we are redeemed and made holy in the eyes of God. 

Catholics show such great devotion to the crucifix of our Lord, placing it in all of our churches, school classrooms, and homes because by it we are reminded of the source of our salvation and also the life we’ve been chosen to lead.

We are to love God with our whole heart, mind, soul, and strength, and that love is not a matter of lip service or a sentiment an emotion, but allows Jesus to teach us the way of self-sacrificial love, to fill us with his spirit of self-sacrificial love.

Lent is such an important season in the life of the Church for one because we contemplate the depths and God’s love for us in all that Jesus suffered, but also because the Lenten program of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving conditions us to embrace and practice that same form of love. Fasting conditions us to sacrifice the things we enjoy to achieve a higher good. Almsgiving as well, forms us in that practice of looking to the needs of others and sacrificing our goods for their good. And prayer, places us at the font of love, it contemplates love, drinks deeply of love, that we may have the courage and fortitude to practice love, to become love for the glory of God and salvation of souls.

 

That our Lenten observances will bring about profound renewal in our parish and in our lives and relationships.

That God will rescue all those who live at a distance from him because of self-absorption or sin, that this evening’s diocesan wide celebration of the Sacrament of Reconciliation will bring about a return of many hearts to communion with God. 

That all families will recommit themselves to fervent prayer this Lent so as to grow in greater love and holiness.  

That this Lent we will be faithful to fasting and to all the ways that the Lord sanctifies us.  We pray to the Lord.

For generous giving for the needs of the poor, the hungry, the homeless, those who are sick, unemployed, victims of natural disaster, terrorism, war, and violence, the grieving and those most in need.  

For all those who have died, for all the poor souls in purgatory…

Mercifully hear, O Lord, the prayers of your Church and turn with compassion to the hearts that bow before you, that those you make sharers in your divine mystery may always benefit from your assistance.

Sacred Heart of Jesus 2021 - The love which surpasses knowledge

 “There is in the Sacred Heart a symbol and a sensible image of the infinite love of Jesus Christ which moves us to love one another.” So wrote, Pope Leo XIII in his 1899 encyclical, Annum Sacrum, in which the Holy Father consecrated the world to the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ. 

Pope Leo seemed to echo an important truth found in our second reading today, from the epistle to the Ephesians. St. Paul speaks of the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge. The love of Christ, in a sense, exceeds the capacity of words to explain. For his love is infinite and our words are finite. So, the image of the Sacred Heart—pierced with the crown of thorns, burning with the fire of divine love—helps us to grasp God’s love for us. The symbol helps us to contemplate a love that is too deep for words

The Greek word Paul uses for love here is “agape”---the love of God which withholds nothing and seeks our highest good. The image of the Sacred Heart is an image of the “agape-love” God has for us. The Lord gave everything, allowing himself to be treated as the lowliest slave, enduring torture and the death of a criminal, to bring about our highest good, our salvation. His love embraces unfathomable suffering and the darkness of death so that sinners may be redeemed.

Light emits from the image of the Sacred Heart because God wants us to know the love that He has for us. 

This day is certainly for reflecting upon, celebrating, and thanking God for his infinite love for us. It is also a day of reparation. A recognition that the stinging thorns embedded in his heart are because of my sins. My actions. My decisions. My failure to love God and love neighbor as a should. As the Lord Himself revealed to St. Margaret Mary, devotees of the sacred heart are to make reparation for the sins which cause His heart “to be wounded by the ingratitude of man.” 

Today is a wonderful day to pray the Litany to the Sacred Heart as we do at our first Friday holy hour every month here at St. Ignatius, for the Lord’s mercy, the mercy of his sacred heart, to cover us, and be more deeply revealed to us, and become more deeply rooted in our own hearts, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.

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We bring our needs to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Please respond to each of these petitions, “Sacred Heart of Jesus, Have Mercy on us”

That the Church may be continually cleansed and sanctified by the blood and water that gave us new birth.

For all who have fallen away from the Church, for those who lack faith, and in reparation for all ingratitude toward God, for all sin and all blasphemy.

For all those who are sick or burdened in any way, may they come to know and experience the refreshment of Christ’s love. 

For the repose of the souls of our beloved dead, for all of the poor souls in purgatory, for the deceased members of our families, friends, and parish, for the deceased priests and religious of the diocese of Cleveland, and for those who have fought and died for our freedom.

Grant, Good Jesus, that we may live in you and for you. Protect us in the midst of danger. Comfort us in our afflictions. Give us health of body, assistance in our temporal needs, your blessing on all that we do, and the grace of a holy death. Through Christ Our Lord.

5th Week of Lent 2019 - Tuesday - Jesus reveals God's love

"When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I AM”

Like the bronze serpent which was salvation for those who looked on it in that first reading, Jesus lifted up on the cross becomes salvation for all who look on him in faith.

What a strange utterance by Jesus, though. Upon the cross, we will realize that Jesus is God. To the ancient sentimentality and to ours, the cross was a sign of defeat. To the worldly minded, what better sign to prove that Jesus is not God. Look at his blood. Look at his suffering. Look at his death. How is that Godlike? How is a man, bloodied, beaten, and crucified, a sign of God, and not just a sign, but the sign par excellence.

Why does the cross, more than any of Jesus’ miracles, more than any of his teachings, show us God? Because it is upon the cross that Jesus shows us that God is radical self-giving love. He is not simply a God of strength who has the power to crush his enemies with brute strength.  He is not simply a God of wisdom who can outsmart his opponents. He’s not like the Gods of the Romans and the Greeks are essentially unconcerned with the affairs of mortals. God is Love, St. John says. And not love in the human erotic sense, or even the strong emotional bonds of family or country.

God is self-giving love. And it is upon the cross where that is most evident in the life of Jesus. “There is no greater love than one who lays down his life for his friends”.

And this is what Lent has been preparing us for: All the Lenten practices of helping us to be attentive to the needs of others, willingly undergoing penances so that we are not so afraid of suffering. So that we, like Him, can give away our lives in self-giving. The measure of holiness is our willingness to give of ourselves. Meaning in life is discovered, God is discovered, not in gaining possessions, having control over our peers, but in giving of ourselves in self-sacrifice for the good of others. This is a fundamental dimension of human salvation: being saved from selfishness by embracing self-donation.

May we look to Jesus, and so the merciful self-giving face of God, may we see him and believe in him and follow him unto the cross, unto death, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.
 
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That the Church will experience the graces of profound renewal during this season of Lent.  That we may grow in our eagerness in spreading the Gospel of Christ.

That all Christian families will recommit themselves to putting Christ at the center of their family life, so as to grow in faith, hope, and love.  We pray to the Lord.

For an end to abortion and for the reverence and protection of human life.  We pray to the Lord.
For the young people of our Church. May they be strengthened to be witnesses to the Gospel of mercy and work for a future that embodies a genuine culture of life.

For those preparing to enter the Church at Easter: that they will be profoundly blessed in their preparation for full initiation into the Body of Christ.  We pray to the Lord.

For the needs of the poor, the hungry, the homeless, those who are sick, unemployed, or suffering from addiction, mental, or physical illness, imprisoned, and those most in need: that the Lord in his goodness will be close to them in their trials.  We pray to the Lord.

For all who have died, and for all the poor souls in purgatory, and for X. for whom this Mass is offered.

Mercifully hear, O Lord, the prayers of your Church and turn with compassion to the hearts that bow before you, that those you make sharers in your divine mystery may always benefit from your assistance.