Fifth Sunday of Easter
“Easier said than done.” We’ve probably heard and/or used that phrase countless times. But it sure applies to today’s Gospel. Jesus says, “‘I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.’” It’s certainly easy to say that we should love others as God loves us. But when it comes to actually doing it, that’s a different story.
Loving others can be difficult in two ways: knowing what love is, and then actually following through on loving others. One of the greatest errors of modern society is with the definition of love. Some say love is never having to say you’re sorry. For others love is a feeling of delight in another person. We use the word so often for different situations: love of food, love of a significant other, love of family, love of country, love of God. We use the same word love for things that are very different from each other, or, at least, should be.
For Catholics, love, true love, is willing the good of the other. To love another person we have to want what is good for them and work for it. Sometimes love means having to apologize for when we have done wrong, or forgiving someone else when they have wronged us. Sometimes love doesn’t come with any good feelings. Graduates, your teachers loved you when they gave you homework, and made you take exams. In at least some cases, I bet that didn’t feel so good (or at least it would have felt better if you didn’t have homework or exams). Graduates, your parents loved you when they kept you away from danger, when they gave you a spanking to help you know right from wrong, and when they dragged you to church every Sunday (maybe when they dragged you to church today). You may not have appreciated that love, but they truly were acting for your good. They wanted what is good for you and did their best to share it with you.
We often, as a society, divorce the truth from love. We act as if they have nothing to do with each other. But when love is separated from truth, it becomes mere infatuation or sentimentality, a feeling for something. Think of a friend whom you know was being cheated on by a boyfriend or girlfriend. What was the most loving thing to do? Let them live in ignorant bliss for a while, oblivious to the infidelity? Or tell your friend that the person with whom they were infatuated did not really love them? Knowing the truth, which is intimately connected with goodness, helps us to love one another.
But besides knowing what love truly is, loving is hard because we actually have to follow through on willing the good of the other. It is much easier to ignore other people, or to pretend that we don’t have any responsibility towards them than to love them. In some ways our society also has made the act of loving more difficult. People are now glued to their smart phones, their faces in a glaze at the screen even as they walk and drive. We constantly see pictures of people who end up in danger because they’re trying to help someone who looks like they need a helping hand. And if something goes wrong when trying to help someone, the person who tried to follow Jesus’ command to love might get sued. All of those things and more can reinforce the mentality to mind our own business. Plus, sometimes the people who need love do not run in our social circles, and we don’t want to be embarrassed by friends when we help them. Throughout your schooling, dear graduates, I’m sure there were times where you felt the Holy Spirit in your conscience, encouraging you to help a classmate who was being teased or ostracized, or maybe even to stop antagonizing them yourselves. How hard it was at those times to actually love that person because of peer pressure. Here’s also a sad fact: peer pressure does not stop with middle or high school; it will continue for the rest of your life in different forms.
But in the midst of those difficulties, all of us, but especially you, dear graduates, need to be witnesses of true love, of willing the good of the other. I remember well the excitement of graduating from high school, the anticipation of college, the joy of being away from my parents (though I did love them). I had so much energy to change the world for the better, to learn the things that would help me transform the world. And that energy is a blessing that will help you to love. But in order to keep up that enthusiasm, you need the Holy Spirit to keep that love of others going. You will need the Holy Spirit, Whom you received in a new, fresh outpouring when you were confirmed, to help you to know the truth more and more, and to love others in that truth.
The world can be transformed by your witness. The world needs to be transformed by your love. As St. John says in his first letter, “let us love one another, not in word or speech, but in deed and truth.”
