5th Sunday of Easter, Year C
First Reading: Acts 14:21b–27
Second Reading: Revelation 21:1–5a
Gospel Reading: John 13:1, 31–33a, 34–35
By Rev. Vincent J. Hawkswell
“I give you a new commandment: that you love one another,” Jesus said before he died. “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”
Here, in the Greek, the verb “love” is agapate; the noun is agape, or, in Latin, caritas. We used to translate them into English as “charity,” but “charity” has dwindled to “almsgiving.” We now translate agape as “love,” but in English, “love” can also mean affection, friendship, or eros.
Affection is the feeling we have for people or things we are familiar with. Friendship is the feeling we have for someone who shares our interests. Eros is that feeling “between man and woman which is neither planned nor willed, but somehow imposes itself upon human beings,” as Pope Benedict XVI said.
These are not the love Jesus commanded. We do not feel them for strangers or enemies. In fact, they cannot be promised, ordered, or manufactured, for they are beyond our control.
In contrast, agape — the “love” that Jesus commanded — is not a feeling, but an act of the will; not something that happens to us, but something we do, intentionally, on purpose — even to someone like Hitler.
Agape seeks nothing for itself, but only the good of the beloved. This is the love God has toward us — not because we are lovable, but because he is love, St. John said. He loves us even when we rebel against him: God “proves his love for us,” St. Paul says, “in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
How can we obey Jesus’ command to love everyone with this kind of love?
First, we pray for them — even Hitler and anyone like him.
Second, especially during this holy Jubilee year, we communicate to them the “sure and certain hope” we have as Catholics.
In everyday English, we say, “I hope it won’t rain tomorrow.” We seldom say, “I trust it won’t rain tomorrow” — especially in Vancouver!
However, what the Church means by “hope” is closer to what we mean by “trust.” We can see this from the title to Pope Francis’ Bull of Indiction of the Ordinary Jubilee of the Year 2025: Hope does not disappoint.
In fact, “trust” is used to define “hope” as the virtue “by which we desire the Kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises, and relying not on our own strength,” but on the help of the Holy Spirit.
“Everyone knows what it is to hope,” Pope Francis said. “In the heart of each person, hope dwells as the desire and expectation of good things to come, despite our not knowing what the future may bring.
“Even so, uncertainty about the future may at times give rise to conflicting feelings, ranging from confident trust to apprehensiveness, from serenity to anxiety, from firm conviction to hesitation and doubt. Often we come across people who are discouraged, pessimistic, and cynical about the future, as if nothing could possibly bring them happiness.
“For all of us, may the jubilee be an opportunity to be renewed in hope. God’s word helps us find reasons for that hope.
“Christian hope does not deceive or disappoint because it is grounded in the certainty that nothing and no one may ever separate us from God’s love,” he said: “‘Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.’
“Here we see the reason why this hope perseveres in the midst of trials: founded on faith and nurtured by charity, it enables us to press forward in life.
“As St. Augustine observes: ‘Whatever our state of life, we cannot live without these three dispositions of the soul: namely, to believe, to hope, and to love.’”
Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English, with new insights, in both print and YouTube form, at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. He is also teaching the course in person on Sundays (2 – 4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver) and Mondays (10 a.m. – noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver). The title of next week’s talk is Marriage and the Family.
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