Fifth Sunday in Easter – 5/5/07

 

Easter 5

 

Fifth Sunday in Easter – 5/5/07
 
If loving people was easy, Jesus would not have had to go around reminding everyone to do it. It is a radical love – a challenging love…..   not a wishy-washy love…..
We all know that this is not an easy task. It is fairly easy to love those who are loving to us at the moment. Loving those who are cranky to us, those who reject us, those who think we are fools, those who resent us, etc.—that is the real task. Jesus tells us that "This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."

We can find so many ways to resist loving one another and we find ways to justify that resistance. Some times we must be pushed to become more open to others. This was also the experience of the early Church. At first, as we read in parts of the Acts of the Apostles, the followers of Christ would only preach to the Jewish people. They really had to be pushed by the Spirit in order to open up and accept non-Jewish people as followers of Jesus.

Today's first reading tells us that we must undergo hardships to enter the Kingdom of God. Yet almost everything about western culture speaks of trying to avoid any hardships. Our cultural values are about having more than enough of everything, about having everything that we want or desire, about having control over our own lives and the lives of others, etc. The follower of Jesus Christ must begin to work against these values, striving to have only that which really helps the inner life of prayer and the inner life of loving others. That will surely be hardship for most of us since our lives are fairly comfortable.

Is Jesus against having a comfortable life? Not at all! But Jesus wants us free to do the will of the Father and to have deep interior freedom means that we must always be able to give up comfort when it stands in the way of loving others—and that interior freedom can only grow if we practice an honest asceticism. That means that we must at times embrace an uncomfortable life so that our freedom can grow stronger.
But also, the word 'love' is highly misused…. Love does not mean saying 'yes' to everything and everyone….   'love' is not necessarily a synonym for 'niceness' .   Christian love does not mean being some kind of 'dormats for Christ' where everyone feels they can demand and act badly and because we are expected to 'love' we must put up with it….   Love can be tough-love….    Love can mean saying "no"   and refusing to cooperate with destructive things.

In the end, though, actions do speak louder than words……Those who do not believe can only begin to come to faith if they see that our lives have been changed by following the Lord. May the Holy Spirit come upon on in these Easter days and may we be strengthened in our capacity to love one another. If that happens, then surely we can know the new heaven and the new earth that the Second Reading today speaks about so clearly.

We want to see our earth with all tears wiped away. We want to see our earth renewed in the image of God. How we long to live without war and with the peace and joy of God in our hearts! Politics cannot ever bring this about, but faith can. May our faith be strengthened! God is making all things new.

(adapted from homily of the abbot, "Monastery of Christ in the Desert")