April 24^th 2016.  Fifth Sunday of Easter

GOSPEL John 13:31-35

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Translated from a homily by Don Fabio Rosini, broadcast on Vatican Radio

Don Fabio’s reflection follows the Gospel reading ...

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GOSPEL John 13:31-35

When Judas had gone Jesus said:

‘Now has the Son of Man been glorified,
and in him God has been glorified.
If God has been glorified in him,
God will in turn glorify him in himself,
and will glorify him very soon.
My little children, I shall not be with you much longer.
I give you a new commandment:
love one another;
just as I have loved you,
you also must love one another.
By this love you have for one another,
everyone will know that you are my disciples.’

The Gospel of the Lord: Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ

Kieran’s summary . . . In this week’s Gospel, Jesus gives the new commandment to “Love one another as I have loved you”. What is new about the new commandment? In the Old Testament there was already an older exhortation to love my neighbour as myself. But the problem with this older commandment was that it made me the measure of my love. If I love my neighbour as myself then my love will be weak, inconsistent, faltering. It will not be unwaveringly loyal. It will not endure very long because anything that depends purely on me will have fairly dramatic imperfections and limits. Only Jesus can provide the true measure of authentic love! He is the model and inspiration of genuine Christian love that renounces oneself totally for the sake of the other. Not only is he the model: by uniting ourselves with him in his self-sacrificial love, we attain the capacity to love like he did. Jesus’s love for us does not depend on our merits or talents. He loves us as we are in an unconditional and complete way.

What is new about the new commandment?

This week we hear Jesus give the new commandment of love. Why is the commandment considered new? Had nothing of this sort ever been heard before? In a sense, something of the sort had been heard before. But the new commandment is always new in the sense that it belongs to the “new man”. In a celebrated passage, St Augustine speaks of the new man who sings a new song and lives according to the new commandment. He is the man created by God, a person who takes his point of departure from a new reality altogether. In the first reading, Paul and Barnabas rejoice that God has opened the door of faith to the pagans. They are amazed that God can create new life in people who couldn’t have been further from God, according to the Hebrew mentality characteristic of the Old Testament. And now these people have the capacity to share in the power of the resurrection, to partake in new life.

If I love my neighbour as myself, then my love for my neighbour will be weak, unfaithful, inconsistent and mediocre

In the book of Leviticus, a commandment is given to love one’s neighbour as oneself. The parameter and measure of this commandment, of course, is oneself. The commandment may or may not be effective, depending on the stature of the person in question. If I love my neighbour with my own capacity to love, with my own capacity for fidelity, with my own capacity for endurance, then the end result is no more and no less the power that lies within me. And the experience of the Old Testament is one of failure. If I am the measure and fulcrum of love, then I will find myself wholly inadequate when confronted with the demands inherent in loving my neighbour.

The true measure and origin of all love is the love that God has for each of us

But Jesus raises all of this onto a new plane. “As I have loved you, so you must love one another”. Here, the point of reference is Jesus. We have been loved by him and this is our motivation for loving each other. Our love is often vain, inconsistent, short-lived and mediocre because it originates solely within us. This kind of love depends on our will, our consistency, our commitment. This is mistaken. Our love must be a response: we love because we have been loved. We must look to God as the origin of love. One of the traps set by the serpent for Eve was to get Eve to focus her attention solely on Eve. The serpent encourages her to be disobedient so that she might become like God. The fixation with who we are in ourselves is a futile fixation. The more relevant question is who God is. I am who I am because God loves me. If I depart from myself then I will feel insufficient, empty and frustrated. The only way out of this vacuum is to contemplate continuously the love of God for us.

The glory of God does not consist in fanfare or ostentation but in the consistency, substance, and fidelity of his love. It is not love based on our merits, but love that arises from the nature of God who cannot help but to love each of us unconditionally and completely.

The Gospel this Sunday begins by recounting the exit of Judas from the Last Supper. Jesus then says, “Now is the Son of Man glorified and God is glorified in him”. Where is this glory? In Hebrew, “glory” refers to the value of something, its substance, the consistency of one’s acts. In his relationship with Judas, Jesus shows his consistency and substance. Jesus would have done everything to save his betrayer. If we see someone treat another person with kindness, even though that person has behaved in a negative and hateful way, then we see the greatness and dignity of that first person. Jesus manifests his benevolence in his dealings with Judas; he reveals the nature of God. God glorifies his Son; in other words, he possesses this love of an unconditional and scandalous sort; a love that is vindicated by the resurrection. God loves us according to this glory. God does not love us according to our merits but according to his own tenderness; he does not love us according to what we deserve but according to the measure by which he knows us and considers us dear to him. If we remain focussed on who we are for the heavenly Father, then we could not help but exercise mercy, welcome, patience and true benevolence to all the people who surround us! Let us welcome the call of this Gospel to pass from the state of living according to ourselves over to a state of living by the love of Christ, grounding our lives and actions on the extent to which we are loved and esteemed by him.