5th Sunday of Easter, Year C
First Reading: Acts 14:21b-27
Second Reading: Rev 21:1-5a
Gospel Reading: Jn 13:1, 31-33a, 34-35
“Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another,” Jesus commanded the night before he died for us.
Here, in the Greek, the verb “love” is agapate; the noun is agape. We used to translate agape as “charity,” but “charity” has dwindled to “almsgiving.” Now we translate agape as “love,” but “love” can also mean the natural loves: affection, friendship, and eros (sexual love).
Agape is “the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our neighbour as ourselves for the love of God,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Loving people for their own sake means loving them with a natural love. Normally, we should encourage these loves, for they help us exercise agape. Moreover, they all (especially eros) help us to see what agape entails.
However, the natural loves are not what Jesus commanded. They are feelings, but agape is an act of the will. They cannot be promised, ordered, or produced to order, but agape can. They do not encompass strangers or enemies, but, out of agape for us, Jesus died for all human beings without exception.
How do we go about obeying Jesus’ command?
When a man asked educator Stephen Covey what he should do now he no longer loved (eros) his wife, Covey said, “Love (agape) her. Serve her. Sacrifice. Listen to her. Empathize. Appreciate. Affirm her.”
Act as if you love her. (It is lifelong agape, not lifelong eros, that spouses promise each other.)
In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye had not met Golde before their marriage. Now, 25 years later, he asks her, “Do you love me?” and she replies, “For 25 years I’ve washed your clothes, cooked your meals, cleaned your house, given you children, milked the cow ... If that’s not love, what is?”
Loving acts are love.
Agape is patient and kind, St. Paul says. It is not jealous, rude, self-seeking, snobbish, or prone to anger. It does not put on airs or brood over injuries. It does not rejoice in what is wrong, but rejoices with the truth. There is no limit to its forbearance, trust, hope, or power to endure.
”Agape never fails,” he concludes.
Shakespeare agrees: “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds ... If this be error, and upon me prov’d, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”
All this describes how agape behaves, but does agape really have the warmth of love?
Yes. Paradoxically, acting as if we love someone out of love for God produces loving feelings. If we act lovingly toward everyone, we find ourselves loving people naturally more and more, and loving naturally more and more people.
Mother Teresa said, “All we do – prayer, work, or suffering – is for Jesus. Our work has no other reason or motivation. We nurse him, feed him, clothe him, visit him, comfort him in the poor, the abandoned, the sick, the orphans, the dying. I serve Jesus 24 hours a day. Whatever I do is for him.”
Once, before sending a novice to a home for the dying, she pointed out how carefully the priest had touched Jesus’ body at Mass. “Do the same when you go to the home,” she said, “for Jesus is there in his distressing disguise.”
When the girl returned, she said, “They brought in a man from the street covered with maggots, and for three hours I touched the body of Christ.”
Could any natural love be that warm?
Jesus’ command means not only practising agape, but also accepting it, for we are all, in some ways, naturally unlovable. Our parents, spouses, and children must, at times, love us with agape: not because we are lovable, but for love of God.
Natural love must be merited, noted Francis Thompson in his poem The Hound of Heaven. Only God sees what we are, and still loves us.
Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English. The whole course is available in written form and Sessions 1-32 in YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 33, “Marriage and the Family,” will be available in YouTube form starting May 15.