Third Sunday of Easter, Year B
First Reading: Acts 3:13-15, 17-19
Second Reading: 1 Jn 2:1-5
Gospel Reading: Lk 24:35-48
“Thus it is written,” said Jesus: “that the Christ is to suffer.” By Jesus’ passion and death, God “fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets: that his Christ would suffer.”
Jesus knew that this was his mission. From the moment Peter acknowledged him as “the Messiah, the Son of the living God,” he “started to indicate to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly there.” When Peter objected, “God forbid, Master!” Jesus turned on him and said, “Get out of my sight, you satan!” (The Hebrew satan means “to plot against another.”)
“God so loved the world that he gave His only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life,” St. John says.
The very word “gave” indicates that our salvation “must be achieved” by God the Son “through his own suffering,” said Pope St. John Paul II. In this suffering, the infinite love of both the Father and the Son is manifested.
Was there no other way for God to save us? Is suffering the only way to love?
Yes, said Pope Benedict XVI. “We must think of love as suffering.”
“To say yes to love is always to risk suffering,” he noted, for “love means being dependent on something that perhaps can be taken away from me.”
To say no is to decide that rather than have to “bear this risk,” to see “my self-determination limited,” to “depend on something I cannot control,” I would “rather not have love.” (Paradoxically, this suffering delights lovers; they positively enjoy giving up their own wishes for the sake of the beloved.)
God is love. Pope John Paul II said that in the Holy Trinity, God “lives a mystery” of inter-personal “loving communion,” and in “a plan of sheer goodness,” he created us to have us share in that life: to make the “total gift of self that the three divine Persons make to one another.” (The Pope used the phrase “gift of self” 73 times in 17 major documents.) Though present in a special way in marriage, that gift “ought also to be at the heart of every other interpersonal relationship.”
Now love, by its nature, must be free; it cannot be pre-programmed. Accordingly, God gives us the freedom we need to love or not to love. “History as a whole is the struggle ... between love and the refusal to love,” said Pope Benedict.
In saying no to love, we freely chose hell—the only place outside heaven where we can be perfectly free from all the risks of love. God allows us that freedom even though he himself thereby risks suffering.
Can God suffer? Yes, said St. Bernard. God, our Creator, is not dependent on us as we, His creatures, are dependent on him, but in loving us he makes himself vulnerable. He “thirsts that we may thirst for him,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
When God the Son assumed our nature, he assumed “the world of human suffering,” caused by human sin, said Pope John Paul. “At the heart of his teaching” were the beatitudes, addressed to those who suffer. From his baptism on, he drew closer and closer to all human suffering.
Finally, by giving us his Body and Blood as food at the Last Supper, he united sinful humanity to himself like infected branches grafted onto a sound vine. Accordingly, in the Garden of Gethsemani, he began to suffer the agony of sin’s chief consequence: separation from his Father.
Christ went toward his death with full awareness of the mission that he had to fulfil “precisely in this way,” said Pope John Paul. He knew that only through the cross could he “strike at the roots of evil.”
He went forward in obedience to his Father, but united to him in the love with which God loves the world.
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 from 2 to 4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver, and Mondays from 10 a.m. to noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver. The title of the presentation next week is Love of God and Neighbour. The course is entirely free of charge and no pre-registration is necessary.
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