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.
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