AIM: To present
Jesus as the personification of God=s
unconditional love for us, who appeals to us for a response.
Only one American President has been
inaugurated four times: Franklin Roosevelt. Each time he took the oath of
office on a family Bible opened to the passage we heard in our second reading:
Paul=s great description of love. Franklin
Roosevelt was not a particularly religious person. Yet Paul=s words clearly made a deep impression
on him. It is worth taking time to reflect on them today.
What is love anyway? To that question
there are many answers. The shortest answer, and the best, is this. Love is a
person. His name is Jesus Christ. If we want to know what love means, therefore,
we must look at Jesus Christ. He tells us love=s meaning in the most persuasive
language of all: the language of his own example.
How does any of us learn how to love?
By being loved. The first people to love us were probably our parents. A
film on natural childbirth which I saw years ago illustrated this beautifully.
It showed a newborn baby being placed for the first time in the arms of the
mother. AO, you beautiful baby,@ the mother cries spontaneously. AI love you already!@
Where does a mother get the ability
to welcome with such joy and tenderness the infant who has caused her months of
inconvenience and perhaps hours of pain?
She gets it, ultimately, from her mother. Where did she
get it? Where does this whole cycle of love start? It starts with the One who is
love. Love is a person. His name is Jesus Christ.
Probably most of us would say that we
are loving people. Are we, really? Aren=t there a lot of other things we=re equally good at, or better? What
about hating, envying, tearing people down by repeating gossip about them, and
trying to build ourselves up by grabbing the spotlight? Most of us are probably
pretty good too about getting what we want, reaching for things that give us
thrills and satisfaction. None of that has anything to do with love.
True love is a person. His name is
Jesus Christ. Paul=s words in our second reading are not merely the description
of a virtue. They are the portrait of a person B the person who is love. His
name is Jesus Christ. If you doubt that, I suggest you read Paul=s words, substituting the name of
Jesus wherever Paul writes Alove.@
It would go like this:
AJesus is patient, Jesus is kind. He
is not jealous, he is not pompous, he is not inflated, he is not rude, he does
not seek his own interests, he is not quick-tempered, he does not brood over
injury. Jesus does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. Jesus
bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Jesus
never fails.@
It fits, doesn=t it? Would the name of any of us fit
as well? Hardly. For each of us there are limits to our ability to bear
all things, believe all things. And there are certainly limits to our ability
to hope and to endure. Though we may be patient at times, often we are not. Most
of us have had problems with jealousy.There may have been times when we were
pompous and inflated, when we=ve been rude, sought our own interests, been quick-tempered,
and brooded over injuries, real or imagined. And as for rejoicing over wrongdoing,
which of us at some time has not taken pleasure in repeating gossip about
someone else=s bad conduct?
The bottom line is this: our
resemblance to Jesus Christ B to the One who is love B is remote at best. If we are
at all like Jesus Christ, if we have any ability to love, it is a gift, not
something we have obtained by our own efforts. The love we received first from
our parents and others, and which we pass on to others in our turn, is merely
the overflow of the love that God has poured into our hearts through his
Son Jesus, who sends us his Holy Spirit. Paul tells us this too when he writes
in his letter to the Romans: AGod has flooded our inmost heart through the Holy Spirit he
has given us@ (Rom.
How does Christ love us? Is it
a matter of warm feelings in the heart? Is it conceivable that Jesus had loving
feelings about the people who crucified him? Read again Paul=s description of love in our second
reading. You will find nothing there about feelings. It is all about an attitude,
and the deeds which that attitude inspires. This is how Paul describes Christ=s attitude and deeds in the passage
from Romans just quoted. AFor at the very time when we were still powerless, then
Christ died for the wicked. Even for a just man one of us would hardly die,
though perhaps for a good man one might actually brave death; but Christ died
for us while we were yet sinners, and that is God=s own proof of his love towards us@ (Rom. 5:6-8).
The mother says to her newborn baby: AO, you beautiful baby. I love you
already!@ Jesus Christ, who died for us, says:
AThere is no greater love than this,
that a man should lay down his life for his friends@ (John 15:13).
Love is a person, a person who has
laid down his life for us. His name is Jesus Christ. He doesn=t love some ideal version of us: the
people we ought to be, the people we=d like to be, whom we hope one day to
become. No. Jesus Christ loves us right now: with all our loose ends, all our
brokenness, all our weakness, all our sin, all our failure to love as he loves.
That is the gospel. That is the good news.
Jesus, who is love, is also
the Good Physician. He wants to love us into wholeness. He wants to fill us so
full with the healing power of his love that we will be changed. He
wants us to be so full of his love that it will overflow onto others.
How much does Jesus Christ love us?
More than we can ever imagine. Yet he will never force himself B or his love B on any of us. He waits for us freely
to accept him and his love into our lives. For some people, that sounds
threatening. They are afraid to open the door to Jesus. Let me close with some
words of our previous Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, which address this fear.
He spoke them at the Mass beginning his ministry as bishop of Rome
AIf
we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to him,
are we not afraid that He might take something away from us? Are we not perhaps
afraid to give up something significant, something unique, something that makes
life so beautiful? Do we not then risk ending up diminished and deprived of our
freedom? No! If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing,
absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in
this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is
the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship
do we experience beauty and liberation. And so, today, with great strength and
great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to
you: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you
everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return.
Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ B and
you will find true life.@
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