Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year B
First Reading: Acts 9:26-30
Second Reading: 1 Jn 3:18-24
Gospel Reading: Jn 15:1-8
“Let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action,” St. John urges in this Sunday’s Second Reading.
God himself is love, and he calls us to love, too. In fact, Jesus summarized all the commandments as follows: love God for his own sake and, for the love of God, love your neighbour as you love yourself.
What if we cannot feel this love?
The answer is to act as if we do. Feelings are involuntary, and God cannot command what is involuntary. The love God commands is a willed love.
How do we act as if we love God?
“He who obeys the commandments he has from me is the man who loves me,” Jesus said. “Anyone who loves me will be true to my word.”
The first three commandments God gave Moses tell us how to love God, the last seven how to love our neighbours. However, the night before he died, Jesus gave his apostles a new commandment: to love one another not just as we love ourselves, but as he loves us: that is, even to the point of death.
Who are our neighbours?
To answer this question, Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan. Finding a man robbed and left half-dead at the side of the road, he “dressed his wounds,” “hoisted him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, where he cared for him,” even paying in advance for further care.
“Go and do the same,” Jesus concluded. Thus he commanded us to love even complete strangers, but there are two further points.
First, the victim had “asked for it,” so to speak. He was “going down from Jerusalem to Jericho” by a road known to be dangerous: dropping 1100 metres in about 30 kilometres, full of narrow, rocky defiles and sudden turnings which made it the haunt of brigands.
Second, the two men were naturally enemies. “Jews have nothing to do with Samaritans.” When the Jews wanted to insult Jesus, they called him a Samaritan, and, in the next breath, declared that he was possessed by a devil.
Jesus’ parable, therefore, implies that our neighbours include complete strangers, people who have brought their troubles on themselves, and even bitter enemies. In fact, they include every human being in the world.
For us, they include beggars, drunks, drug addicts, AIDS patients. They include those whose wrongdoing is public and frightful: fraudulent politicians, guilty bishops, pedophiles. They include those who have injured us personally: the friend who betrayed us; the co-worker who took our job; the spouse who committed adultery, abandoned us, or abused our children.
Jesus said he will welcome into his kingdom even those who do not know him, but who gave him food when he was hungry and drink when he was thirsty. As often as we do it for one of his least brothers, he explained, we do it for him.
“Whoever the poorest of the poor are, they are Christ for us,” said St. Teresa of Kolkata: Christ in “the disguise of human suffering.” C.S. Lewis said that he once asked a clergyman who had seen Hitler, “and had, by all human standards, good cause to hate him,” what Hitler looked like. The reply was, “Like all men; that is, like Christ.”
The late Sister Josephine Carney, SSA, once watched a tramp come into church, sit down behind a man with a small child, and start smiling at the child. The father turned, smiled, passed the child over the back of the seat, and went on praying.
“It was lovely of you to trust a stranger with your child like that!” Sister Josephine said afterward, and the man replied, “But, sister, didn’t you see who that man was? It was Jesus!”
This is how we are to love: not just “in word or speech, but in truth and action.”