Sunday Gospel Reflections
May 18, 2025 Cycle C
JN
13:31-33A, 34-35
Love One Another
by
Fr. Miserendino
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It often seems odd that
Jesus commands
us to love.
“Command” here is the
challenging word,
the imperative. We’re instructed to love, plain as day in our
Gospel: “I give
you a new commandment: Love one another.” How can you command
someone to love?
Our modern sensibilities
are rankled,
and we respond skeptically: Isn’t love all about emotion and
preference? By
most cultural definitions, you can no more command one person to
love someone
else than you can command them to like pineapple on pizza or to
feel happy. So,
where does Jesus get the idea that we can be commanded to love?
Our Lord persists: “As I
have loved
you, so you also should love one another. This is how all will
know that you
are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
At stake here is a vital
point: Our
Lord offers us a differing portrait of love than the one
commonly displayed in
the world. The world (and its love) is not enough. Our hearts
hunger for
something more. And Christ meets that need, bringing a fuller
love, one that is
more profound, powerful, provocative, and recreative.
If we look at the
wording of Jesus in
today’s Gospel, we realize that the love Christ brings must be
distinctive from
that of the world. After all, if people are to know that we’re
Christians by
our love, it implies that we’d love differently than what’s
found in the world.
Our love as Catholics needs to have pop, curb appeal, that sets
us apart from
our non-Christian neighbors. If it weren’t so, Jesus would no
longer make
sense, saying: “They will know you are my disciples by the fact
that you love
each other just like everyone else does.” This raises the
question: What sets
our love as Christians apart from worldly love?
As mentioned earlier,
the world tends
to categorize love in terms of feelings and preferences.
Unflinchingly, people
can say “I love my mom and I love donuts” in the same sentence.
Though we
sometimes hear the phrase “love is love,” the above phrase
suggests that
there’s more to the picture. We love donuts because they please
us and they’re
delicious. Hopefully, we don’t love our family in the exact same
way. Yet for
many, even love of family is a matter of feeling, emotion and
preference. All
too often, people sever family connections for just those
reasons: The feelings
are gone, and they don’t enjoy the other person’s company.
In contrast, Christ
presents a love
that is not principally a feeling or a preference. Rather, it’s
a choice
followed by action. St. Thomas Aquinas defines love as “to will
the good of the
other for the other’s benefit” and to do what you can to bring
that good about.
Love is a choice to live sacrificially to bring about another
person’s true
good insofar as we’re able. Sometimes (and hopefully often), the
feelings and
preference are present for the person we’re trying to love. Yet,
sometimes they
are not. The choice to wish that person’s good and reasonably
help them to
attain it remains the same, regardless of our feelings.
It’s worth noting a few
things here:
First, the deepest good we can wish for a person in any
situation is their
union with God and their salvation. So, true love never leads to
sin. Second,
what that love looks like in practice depends on our
relationships and the
duties of those relationships. For example: I am commanded by
Christ to love
both my mother in Virginia and strangers in Kuala Lumpur. Yet,
the choices I
make in love for my mother’s good are different than for the
stranger both in
terms of practical distance and personal relationship, and that
is completely
acceptable.
Last, note that this
distinctive love
is exactly the love Christ manifests to us. Christ wills our
good — our
salvation — and makes the necessary sacrifice to bring it about
— the cross and
Resurrection. There is much more to say on this than space
affords here.
One final thought.
Often, people ask
what to do if the feelings of love go away in a relationship?
What then?
One of the monks at Holy
Cross Abbey in
Berryville, Brother Aelred Joseph, shared a quote from Rabbi
Abraham Joshua
Heschel that is helpful: “While love is hibernating, loyal deeds
must speak.”
(This quote applies to more than this single topic. Sit with it
a while.)
Often, love is present but dormant like a fuzzy critter
slumbering in a cave.
What saves the day,
meanwhile? Christ
holds the answer out to us: The loyal deeds of love, making the
choice to will
the good of the other. Those actions nourish us until love
awakens in fullness
and truth, be it in this life or the one to come.