Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia
Today's very short reading from St. John's Gospel
focuses our attention on our Lord's New Commandment.
And as I have loved you, so you should also love one another.
Our Lord upheld all the commandments of God
in his preaching to his disciples.
Famous passage where he says that I came not to abolish the law,
but to fulfill it.
And not one part or smallest part,
of the law will pass away until it all is fulfilled.
And yet, in addition to the natural law
and the commandments that are written in our heart
and mandated by the revelation of the Old Testament,
our Lord gives us this new commandment of love.
And not just any kind of love.
We know that that word today means a lot of different things.
And very often it really has nothing at all to do
with what our Lord speaks of in the Gospel.
And it's entirely inconsistent with the love or charity
that our Lord speaks of.
It's a very specific and different kind of love.
A love that only can be practiced in the state of grace.
It's a gift from God.
Because, as our Lord tells us, it is his love.
Love one another as I have loved you.
And that's not just a commandment given to us
by someone who stands at a distance and says,
you know, this is what you have to do,
and points his finger at us.
On the contrary, our Lord became one of us.
He shared our humanity.
He brought divinity down to earth.
And, uh...
Into our own, our own lot, our own state of affairs.
And he has united himself with us.
We are partakers in the divine nature through baptism.
We share in the divine life.
And so when our Lord says to us,
love one another as I have loved you,
it's not just an example.
It is that.
He showed the apostles, he lived with them,
for three years.
And the things that he said to them,
he realized in his own person.
You know, he walked the walk.
And that walk ultimately led him to Calvary.
And so when he says, love one another as I loved you,
as he does in this particular gospel,
which takes place during the Last Supper,
you know, he's leaving them with a context
in which they are to understand his passion and death.
That's how our Lord loved us.
He loved us unto death from the cross.
And yet, it's not just an example.
The crucifix isn't just, you know,
something that we place on the wall and, you know,
look at it and say, gee, God has loved me this much.
But it's also something that we enter into.
We also come before the altar of our Lord
and we see the Eucharist.
And we do say, yes, look how much God has loved me.
But the Eucharist comes to us.
Jesus comes to dwell with us, not just in this room,
in this sacred space, but in the sacred space
of our own bodies and souls.
He comes, he longs to dwell with us.
He feeds us with himself and makes it possible for us truly
to love one another as he has loved us.
It's not just an example.
It's something that our Lord realizes in us
through his presence in us.
And this is certainly what he was trying to communicate
to his apostles before he died upon the cross
and at the moment that he instituted the Eucharist
and the sacred priesthood.
And so, you know, the standard that our Lord gives us,
you know, in a sense, is infinitely higher.
It's kind of funny today.
You know, people oftentimes say, incorrectly, of course,
that the beatitudes are not true.
They're not true.
They're not true.
The beatitudes is the new moral code, you know,
the moral code of the New Testament.
The moral code of the Old Testament was the
Ten Commandments, and the moral code
of the New Testament is the beatitudes,
as though we've superseded the Ten Commandments
and we really don't need to worry about, you know,
not stealing, not commit adultery, not, you know,
honoring our father and mother or, on the other hand,
honoring our father and mother.
We don't have to worry about those things now.
We just live the beatitudes.
This is completely false, of course, because the beatitudes
are the fruit of living the commandments.
The beatitudes are God's blessing upon us,
God's blessing upon us for having done the right thing.
We will be, you know, we will be blessed by God
if we are poor in spirit.
He will give us the kingdom if we are poor in spirit.
But the fruit of that blessing is the fruit of living
an honest and upright life in the presence of God.
So that's, that's a false concept.
But so far from our Lord lowering the standard when he says he gives us the New Commandment
as though we can love one another without observing the Ten Commandments, he raises
the bar.
He raises the bar, but at the same time, he gives us the strength to live his commandments
out of love.
Ultimately, that's what we're supposed to do.
The Pharisees didn't have love in their hearts, you know, they thought they were righteous
men because they could, they could look at their lives and they could say, I did this,
I fasted here, I, you know, I washed my hands, I did this, I did that, I'm better than the
next guy.
They could see it all laid out before them and they, and they judged by their own corrupt
hearts that they were better than other people.
And of course that was false, they had no love in their hearts and that's why they rejected
our Lord when he came to them, because they had no real charity.
On the contrary, the, the love of Christ.
Christ gives us the strength to do the right thing and to do it for the right reasons.
Not to feel as though the law of God is on us as a burden, that the church is always
telling us what to do, but that God has loved us so much that he has revealed his wisdom
to us.
And he has given us the strength to live a life that is pleasing to him out of love for
him.
St. Paul tells us in his writings that, you know, that he juxtaposed love and love for
God.
He opposes the, he opposes rather the, the, the law and the spirit.
But he's not saying, you know, that, that now we live in the spirit, we don't no longer
have to live under the law, but, but we are free now to live the law because we have the
spirit.
We're free to do it out of love.
We don't see, we don't have to see the law as parameters on our freedom, but rather
as his blessing, God's blessing.
And the opportunity.
That we have to love, you know, those who truly love and love generously, of course,
like our Lord, like our blessed mother, like, like the saints and the holy martyrs found
it, found every opportunity to do something for God and neighbor, found every opportunity
to suffer something for the one they love doesn't as truly that an opportunity, not,
not a, a burden or a chore, but an opportunity.
And it's.
It's wonderful for us to see that, you know, we, we, you know, we don't like work sometimes
we don't like to suffer and we see limitations on our freedom and, and the burden of having
to do difficult things is truly a burden.
But if we love as Christ has loved us, that burden can be lifted from us and we can find
joy.
You know, there's nothing more joyful than a generous heart.
Nothing.
There's nothing more that brings more peace and tranquility than, than a, than a heart
that is free of selfishness, that a heart that is free of self-concern and you know,
constant looking at oneself and thinking about what I don't have, what I can't do, you know,
what somebody, this person is doing to me or what that person is doing to me but rather
on the contrary.
It sees all of these things as an opportunity for us to show the Lord how much he loved
us.
Nobody has more to complain about than our Lord.
You know, we can, we have our little, little ambit of, of, of, of, of social interaction
with people.
And there's all kinds of people in our life and some of them we like, some of them we
don't like.
Some of them treat us well.
Some of them don't.
And we can complain.
You know, we can tend to, to say, you know, this and that about this other person.
When we think about it though, our Lord has everybody to complain about.
And he sees not only the, the things that are external.
He knows each and every one of our hearts.
He knows every malicious thought.
He knows every impure thought.
He knows, you know, every, uh, lack of generosity that goes to the, the core of a person.
Uh, being, he sees everything.
And all of it is offensive to him.
All of it is offensive to him.
And yet he loved us, uh, not because we were his friends, but because he was generous.
He made us his friends.
And uh, he called the apostles his friends at the Last Supper.
Even though, you know, in a, in a couple of hours they were all gonna run.
They all ran.
And he was deserted.
But he loved us.
He loved them.
He loved us.
And that is why we're here.
And he was just about to die.
He was just about to die for him.
And yet he knew it.
By them.
By his friends.
Who he had just celebrated the first Eucharist for.
Who he was just about to die for.
They all deserted him.
Uh, and, and yet, and he knew it.
It wasn't like, you know, be, at the Last Supper, he didn't know these things were
gonna happen.
When he called them his friends, he knew what they were gonna do.
He knew they were gonna betray him.
Uh, and yet, you know, he did this for them.
And, and so our Lord, you know, we, let's let's remember that.
Let's remember this context.
It's the Eucharist.
It's the Last Supper, the first sacrifice of the Mass.