Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church

Homily for May 21, 2006
Liturgical Year B-Cycle II
6th Sunday of Easter
by Fr. John Carney
Topic:  Love one another as I have loved you.
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Reading II
1 Jn 4: 7-10
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God.  Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love.  In this way the love of God was revealed to us: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might have life through him.  In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.
 
Gospel
Jn 15: 9 -17
Jesus said to his disciples: “As the Father loves me, so I also love you. Remain in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love.

“I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy might be complete. This is my commandment: love one another as I love you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father. It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you. This I command you: love one another.”
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We often hear this reading at weddings.  It’s my favorite Gospel passage to be used during a wedding, where Jesus commands us to love each other as he loves us.  He doesn’t advise us.  He doesn’t request of us.  He commands us to love each other as he loves us.  The word LOVE  is used 46 times in just the Gospel of John.  In addition, you heard not only in the Gospel, but also in one of John’s letters in the second reading--love, love, love, love.  As a matter of fact, if you submitted that letter to an English teacher it would be all marked up with red--redundant, redundant.  Use synonyms or something. But he needs to use that word, l-o-v-e.
 
But what does it mean?   I mean if Jesus is commanding us to do this we better know what he is commanding us to do.  What does love mean?  It has a lot of meanings to a lot of people.  There’s a lot of misunderstanding about what it is to love.  You go to the dictionary you’ll see this as a definition: Love means a strong affection arising out of kinship.  Is that what he meant?  Attraction based on sexual desire.  I don’t think so.  Affection based on admiration or common interest.  That’s love.  Warm attachment.  Copulation.  I don’t think that was it either.  It means a score of zero in tennis.  Is that what he meant?  There is one excellent definition.  It must have been a theologian working for Webster. They defined love as the unselfish, loyal, and benevolent concern for the good of another.  As an example, the fatherly concern of God for man, or a person’s adoration of God.  That’s pretty good and we’ll come back to that in a moment.
 
Even in the Bible, the word that we translate as love in English has many meanings.  Lots of words were used for love.  In Hebrew and in Greek, probably to the extent that they did not confuse this concept as much as we have a tendency to, what we call romantic love in Hebrew is called ahaba.  The love of a friend, a female friend is Rayah.    The word affection in Hebrew is chabab.  Compassionate love or pity is racham.  That’s with an Irish accent.  I don’t know how they say it.  The love of brothers, you know what that is philadelphos.   And the word in Greek for the love that Christ is talking about is agape or in Hebrew, hesed.  They’re very close in meaning and that’s the unselfish, loyal and benevolent love, the concern for another person.
 
You know, no wonder why there’s so much confusion when people say, “I love you”.  Seriously, several years ago I had a young woman in confession who confessed that she had had sexual relations with her boyfriend but she thought that was okay because at the end of mass the deacon said, “Go in peace to love one another”.  And I said, “You’re… Come on.”  No, she was serious.  She thought that was just fine.  We talked about that a little bit.  Deacon, don’t ever tell kids to do that.
 
Clearly Jesus when he says in John 15,  Love one another as I love you,  he’s talking about this agape love, this hesed love.  That kind of love has some characteristics.  Christian love and true love must entail sacrifice, suffering, and dying to self.  True love always involves sacrifice because you’re doing something to the benefit of another.  You’re using your time, your talents, your treasures, your body, your whatever to help someone else.  It’s sacrificial in it’s very nature, love is.  It is all suffering. You married people know that.  True love always involves suffering, even if it only means that you’ll suffer when you lose the beloved.  But it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.  True love involves suffering and it really involves a dying to the self.  When you love a person, you die to some part of yourself.  I often say that in marriages when we do weddings.  In fact, the man and the woman that walked in here today, died here today. You walk out a different person.  Not two, but one flesh living for one another.  The old self must die. 
 
Sacrifice involves suffering, and dying to self.  Now look at the crucifix and I think you would agree that that describes what he did for us.  The ultimate sacrifice involving great suffering and death to self for love of another.  That’s how he loves us and that’s how he commands us to love each other and that involves action.  Love is a verb.  It means doing something, it involves action, it involves deeds of fidelity and sacrifice.  Sometimes, even to the point of death.  It involves more give than take.  That is especially true in marriage.  You die to yourself to love another.  As a matter of fact, I speak to married folks especially when they’re celebrating their 50th or 60th, and we have some couples now in our parish now married 63 and 64 years, some even higher.  I looked in the Saturday’s paper.  I love to look at the anniversaries.  There is one couple in there, 70 years married.  God bless them.  That’s a long time ago.  I often ask them about it.  One little old lady said to me, “Oh, Father, we still have our little fight every day but it’s worth it.” 
 
To really love a person means that from time to time that you are taken advantage of.  That comes with the turf.  It means that you’re a fool for Christ at other times.  Now I don’t mean to denigrate passionate, romantic love.  That’s God’s great gift to be shared in marriage.  It’s a great gift from God who is the source of passion.  But the love that’s based on romance alone, will fail.  If there’s no self-sacrifice, there’s no true love.
 
Therefore, we look for models of love.  I was thinking, I have a good friend Bobby Halton who’s a firefighter, he was a deputy chief in Albuquerque, then he was the chief of his department in Texas, now he’s working for Firefighting Magazine.  As a matter of fact, he just organized a conference in Indianapolis in April, early May for 30,000 firefighters who gathered. I love firefighters.  I think you know that because they’ll give it all up for you.  They don’t even know you and they’ll die for you.  That’s the love we’re talking about, sacrificial suffering.  I’m always reminded of September 11th, how 343 firefighters died going into those buildings, 343.  A friend of mine was there and he said one of the chiefs was kind of watching his men go in. They looked at him, he looked at the chief, and later the chief said, “They knew.”  They knew that they were likely on their way to death but there was someone to save and they gave their life.  That’s what Jesus Christ is talking about when he said love each other as I have loved you.
 
That’s how our blessed Mother loved.  She gave everything for her son.  That’s how men and women love each other in marriage.  They give everything for their partner and that’s how Jesus loved us.
 
You could almost hear him from the cross saying, “What more can I do to prove my love for you”?  Listen again to these words:
 
“As the Father loves me, so I love you.  Remain in my love.  I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.  This is my commandment: Love one another as I have loved you.”