Finding Love in God

Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen].  A few years ago, after visiting Boston and the bar that served as the model for its self-named series, I had a hankering to re-watch “Cheers,” the 80s sitcom about a bar owned by a washed-up, Boston Red Sox pitcher who is not a paragon of moral virtue.  It turns out the series wasn’t as good as I remember it being when I watched the show (probably because I was young enough that most of the topics the show dealt with flew over my head).  But one part that many people know, even those who haven’t watched a full episode, is the theme song, or at least the lines, “Sometimes you want to go / Where everybody knows your name / and they’re always glad you came…”. There’s a couple more lines, but for the purposes of this homily, that’s enough.
    What made me think of “Cheers” is the Most Holy Trinity, whom we celebrate today.  When it comes to our God, He always knows our name.  And He’s always glad we come to spend time with Him.  Our Trinitarian God, St. John the Apostle and Evangelist tells us in his first epistle, is love.  And love affirms, to paraphrase Bishop Barron and quote a country music title from Dan and Shay, “I’m Glad You Exist.”  There is something especially good about having another person affirm your existence and affirm that they treasure you.  
    There’s nothing “soft” about wanting to be wanted.  God, who is Himself a Trinitarian Communion of Divine Persons, made us in His image, which means that He made us for union with others, whether that be the union of friendship or even, for many the union of Holy Matrimony.  But likewise, God made us for union with Him, which can happen in any and all states of life.  So many people try to mask over that desire with goods which will never truly satisfy.  Maybe, as Luke Combs sings, beer never broke your heart, but it also doesn’t support a healthy self-esteem and a feeling of desirability.  You can buy a lot of things, but as Paul McCartney sings, you can’t buy me love.  
    So many young people, and I’ll admit that I got a little caught up in this too, think that social media affirms them.  And maybe, in some small way, it does.  But a like, or a share, or a snap-streak cannot compete with true love.  The trouble is that social media seems to be set up to give some good feelings, feelings of acceptance and desirability, but ones which quickly fade.  So you post more to get more attention.  But that still fades.  So you post more and more, until you find yourself addicted to social media reactions.  Or, on the flip side, as much as you post, people don’t like or favorite or share your status or pics or posts, which only reminds you more of the lack of true love in your life, sometimes leading to depression or even suicide.  
    God made us for love.  God made us with the desire to be in a communion of human persons and divine Persons.  We need love, just like we need God.  And nothing else will fill that hole in our heart.  Nothing else–not riches, power, fame, or sex–will ever fill up the tanks in our hearts that love can.  
    “God showed His love for us,” St. Paul says, “in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.”  Or, to quote John 3:16: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.”  Love does not equate simply to an emotion, but requires action.  And Christ demonstrated in a way we could understand just how far the love of God would go to reclaim us for Himself, to remind us that nothing earthly thing could ever truly fill our need for love.  God the Father showed His love for us by creating us in His image and likeness.  God the Son showed His love for us by dying on the cross for our salvation.  God the Holy Spirit shows His love for us as we get those God moments, of various types, that remind us just how much God loves us.  The action of love, from the beginning of all time until the consummation (very much a love word) of all time at the return of Christ, is a work of the entire Trinity, who is Himself a Communion of Love.  
    Our role is to accept the invitation into that love that truly makes us whole, and to invite others into that love, too.  The command of Christ at the end of Matthew’s Gospel to baptize all nations is a command to invite the entire world into the love which truly fulfills us.  Baptism, by uniting us to Christ, gives us entry into Trinitarian love.  And everyone needs that, even if they don’t recognize it.  Otherwise, they’ll try to find it in a bottle, in a paycheck, in notoriety, or in power.  And while those will satisfy for a little while, they will leave people feeling even more empty than before, because the thing they thought would fill their need for love abandoned them and lied to them and did not give them what they wanted.  
    We have a God who knows our name.  We have a God who is always glad when we come to Him.  We have a God who is love and who wants to embrace us with His love.  So many other things cry out and pretend to love us.  But in the end, only God’s love, and any true loves connected to God’s love, will last and sustain us.  Through Holy Baptism God joins us to His love.  Through the Mass, we see that love in action as God allows us to join in to the sacrifice of Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, made once for all on Calvary.  Through our daily lives the Holy Spirit helps us to respond to that love that God first offered us.  Don’t search for love in a bar, not even a famous one in Boston.  God’s love is here, ready to be shared.  And God wants us to share that love out there, outside of this church, so that all people can experience the fullness of love, from the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  

Actions & Consequences and A Freely-Given Gift

 Fourth Sunday of Lent

    When I was growing up, if we were flirting with trouble (mostly my sisters, because I was a perfect angel, of course!), my parents would say things like: if I have to pull this car over…; don’t you even think about it…; or other such tried and true methods.  They were not cruel, it was just a very direct form of discipline.  As all of us kids turned our pretty well, I’d say it worked.  But my sister Amanda, the only one with kids right now, often uses the phrase, “Make good choices.”  I’d call that the softer approach, but my nieces are also pretty well-behaved (at least, as far as I know), so that approach apparently can work, too!
    One major aspect of raising children is to help them to understand the consequences of their actions.  If you draw on the wall with crayons, you get time-out.  If you touch the hot stove, you get burned.  If you don’t do your homework, you don’t get to play outside (nowadays it’s more likely play video games or play on your phone).  If you break curfew, you’re grounded.  These small lessons about actions and consequences are meant to help young people understand that if we make good choices, there are, generally, good consequences.  If we make bad choices, there are, generally, bad consequences.
    We see that in the first reading today, and even, to an extent, in our Gospel.  The Books of Chronicles of the Old Testament are the abridged versions of the Books of Kings, explaining the actions of the kings of Judah and Israel.  The lesson at the end of the Second Book of Kings, our first reading today, is that the people made bad choices.  They worshipped foreign gods, they mistreated the poor, they trusted earthly riches and powers more than God, they did not live as God’s Chosen People.  God sent them messengers to tell them to make better choices, but they never listened.  And what was the consequence?  The Temple, the great house of God, was destroyed, and the people were exiled into Babylon.  To echo Bishop Barron, there’s a sort of spiritual mathematics going on.  If you add sin upon sin, you get death, like 2 + 2 = 4.  Notice, that death doesn’t only come because of sin (we see that in other books of the Old Testament), just like 4 can be added to with a few different combinations.  But certain actions have certain consequences, or, to put it in St. Paul’s words, “The wages of sin is death.”  
    Jesus, too, and John the Evangelist, give us this same idea in the Gospel.  “Whoever believes in [Jesus] will not be condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned.”  Again, the spiritual mathematics of the importance of believing in Jesus.  Or, later on, John continues that evil means darkness, whereas God means light.  If we do evil things, we envelope ourselves in darkness.  If we do good things, we are surrounded by light.  This is part of the push to the New Evangelization.  We who have received the light (which will be powerfully demonstrated at the Easter Vigil, as we enter into a dark church, at first only illumined by the Paschal Candle which represents Christ), have a responsibility to share it with others.  And we should not prefer darkness to light, because otherwise we’ll find condemnation.
    But this can tend us to the idea that, if we just check off the right boxes, then we’ll be good.  It makes us the author of our salvation, rather than God.  It pretends that we have what it takes to save ourselves.  If that were so, certainly Abraham, or Moses, or Isaiah would have been in heaven as soon as they died.  But they couldn’t be in heaven without Jesus' saving Death and Resurrection.  Even those just men and women of the Old Testament couldn’t get to heaven on their own.  They, and we, are saved by grace, by the gift of God; it is not earned.
    But Fr. Anthony, you may be saying, you just got done saying that good choices lead to good consequences.  Yes, I did.  But all the good choices in the world couldn’t open up heaven.  It was the consequence of the death of Jesus on the cross that allowed us to enter heaven.  His good choice led to our good consequences.  “God, who is rich in mercy,…” says St. Paul, “brought us to life with Christ….For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God.”  Try getting to heaven without Jesus; it’s impossible.  You might be able to get halfway there every day, but you’ll never get all the way there.  Jesus is the only one who makes salvation possible.  And He’s the only one who gives us what we need to accept that gift of salvation.  If those in other religions are saved, the Church says, it’s still only because of Jesus.  Moses does not save people (nor did he claim to).  Mohammed does not save people.  Buddha does not save people.  Only Jesus does.  And anyone who is saved, is saved only through the Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus.  
    God invites us to salvation.  He invites us to open the gift that He has prepared for us.  But, as with any gift, we can choose whether or not to accept it.  In that way, we’re back to actions and consequences.  If we accept God’s free gift of salvation, heaven is for us.  How do we know that we have accepted that gift?  By the way we live our life; by the good choices we make in response to that gift, because of our love for God.  We can’t earn it, but neither can we receive it without responding to it.  God did not come to condemn us; He sent Jesus to save us.  But the way that we can grab ahold of that salvation is to respond to the gift, to live as Jesus invites us; to make good choices when presented with the free gift of salvation.

For Whom would we Give Up our Life?

Fourth Sunday of Lent

There are a few people, but probably only a few, for whom the average person would give up his or her life.  I think any parent (any good parent, anyway) would give up his or her life for the child.  Siblings sometimes would give up their life for each other.  But generally the list of people for whom another person would give up his or her life is pretty small.

That is what is so impressive about those who serve in the military, law enforcement, or fire departments: they have made a commitment to give up their lives for total strangers.  It is quite humbling for me riding along with our MSP Troopers and seeing them walk up to cars, many with guns in them, and even while they practice safe approaches to the vehicle to limit their chance of being attacked, it still has happened all too frequently that they are in a situation where they may have to lay down their life, not only for a family member or friend, but for the citizens who may not even know they exist.  

If we think about it, giving up our life for a stranger is maybe a little easier if that person is good, maybe what we consider a productive member of society.  But what our first and second reading remind us this weekend is that we weren’t good.  This is an important aspect of salvation history: God loved us and entered into covenants with us to give us life and happiness, but we never lived up to our end of the bargain.  In the Garden of Eden, before we even had sin, we disobeyed God.  God saved Noah and his family because they followed God, but not long after that, Noah’s sons messed things up again.  Abraham did pretty well, but he still had inherited the sin of Adam and Eve that we call original sin.  Moses received the Law, the Ten Commandments from God, and no sooner had God given the Law, then the people broke it.  Even Moses himself couldn’t enter the Promised Land because he had disobeyed God on their journey through the desert.  King Saul disobeyed God, so David was chosen, but even David committed murder to cover up his adulterous relationship with Bathsheba.  Solomon started worshipping foreign gods, even though he had built the temple in Jerusalem, because of the influence of his foreign wives, and most of the kings who followed him were just as evil.  And so on and so on.  No one, not even the prophets, were good enough to earn heaven.  We all were, as St. Paul said in the second reading, “dead in our transgressions.”

And that’s what makes the familiar line we hear in the Gospel so powerful.  It’s not simply a sign that people hold up at football games behind the goal posts.  “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.”  ‘Of course he did!’ we might say to ourselves.  We are so used to God dying for us, to save us from everlasting death and Hell, that we might be a little numb to the power that is in those words.  We might die for family or friends.  We may even die for a good person.  But Jesus died for those who were His enemies: those who worked against Him starting with Adam and Eve, those who clamored for His death in Jerusalem, and for us who have nailed Jesus to the cross each time we sin.  The power of what Jesus did comes from the fact that we were, before baptism, the enemies of God, working against God, happy to do our own thing, rather than follow God.  Even the most just man, because of original sin, was still an enemy of God who could not earn salvation.

How comfortable have so many of us become with the killing of God.  We take it as a matter of fact, and it is in the sense that it has happened.  But it should not have happened.  Jesus is the light of the world, and came not to condemn us but to save us, but we preferred darkness; and so we tried to snuff out the light.  But the light conquered our darkness, as light always does.  

Think of the person who troubles you the most; maybe you even hate that person.  That person has harmed you in a way you find unforgivable.  And now you have to die for that person tomorrow so that he or she can live.  Really think about it; what would be your reaction?  What would be your honest reaction?  Jesus’ reaction was love; not begrudgingly, not with caveats and conditions, not as one forced to do what is for the best, but not the best for Him.  Jesus died for us because He loved us.  He let us kill Him with our sins because He loved us.  We did not earn salvation, nor can we; “this is not from you; it is the gift of God.”  

The question is whether or not we will respond to God’s gift of salvation.  Will we choose the light, or do we prefer darkness?  Do we believe in Jesus, follow Him, and so find eternal life, or will we be condemned because we do not believe?  We are not worth dying for.  But Jesus died for us anyway.  Accept that love of God that died for you so that you may live.  

Picking the Fruit of the Tree of the Cross

Fourth Sunday of Lent

Very few people I know like to get in trouble.  As children (and sometimes as adults) when we have done something that we shouldn’t, something for which we could get in trouble, we tend to run away and hide.  We don’t like to admit that we’ve done something wrong.  If there’s a broken anything in the family house, it was never one of the kids who did it; it was always done by someone named Idont No.  

We probably get this from our first parents, Adam and Eve.  Back in the Garden of Eden, they were tempted to eat the forbidden fruit, to disobey God’s command.  And they both did it.  But then what did they do?  They hid because they were ashamed.  They didn’t want to face God and what the consequences would be.  To admit that they were wrong was to admit that they were naked, totally seen, by God.

We like this first part of the Gospel today, John 3:16.  This passage may be one of the best know passages in all the Bible: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.”  We see it at sporting events, especially football games from people in the seats behind the goal posts.  And it is powerful, and needs to be spread more.  It is important for us always to carry this message with us, that Jesus came as the result of God’s love so that we do not have to perish, to die eternally, but so that we can live eternally.  If you read this passage, you’ll notice that it’s not in quotation marks.  This isn’t some that Jesus said (at least according to modern reading of this passage), but is rather John’s commentary on Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus.

But St. John also says something important later in this same passage: “the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil.”  St. John, having spent three years with Jesus in His public ministry, the same disciple who was beloved by Jesus and leaned on his chest during the Last Supper, was keenly aware that people prefer darkness to the light that Jesus brings.  And why?  Because we think in the darkness we can hide our sinfulness and get away with it.  We don’t want to get in trouble.  We don’t want God to see our imperfections.

But St. Paul reminds us in our second reading that response to sin is not to hide in the darkness, but to run to the mercy of God.  He writes to the Ephesians that God wants to, “show the immeasurable riches of his grace.”  God sent Jesus not to condemn us, but to forgive us.  But to be forgiven, we have to come into the light.  We have to come and admit our sins which cause spiritual death so that God, who is rich in mercy, can forgive us and raise us to new life.  God’s mercy and forgiveness are the fruit of the tree of the cross, the fruit that God wants us to pick regularly and consume.  And God encourages us and pushes us there.  But only we can pick that fruit of mercy, just as only we can pick the fruit of disobedience like our first parents.  

We shouldn’t want to sin and to do bad things.  But when we do, God encourages us to come running to Him, rather than running away from Him.  God wants us to come to the light, rather than to hide in the darkness.  And the funny thing is that God already knows what is in the darkness.  He knows the ways that we have distanced ourselves from Him.  But when we bring it into the light we find not condemnation but mercy.  We are only really in trouble if we continue to prefer the darkness to the light and hide from God.  Because when we hide from God we show that we do not really believe in Him and His power to forgive.  And, while St. John says clearly that, “Whoever believes in him will not be condemned,” he also says in the same sentence, “but whoever does not believe has already been condemned.”  

We can all help to promote people coming to the light, especially in our families.  Yes, there will be negative consequences for making bad choices.  That is the nature of bad choices: there are bad things that follow.  But what a beautiful thing it is when a child or a spouse comes forward to admit that he or she has done wrong.  In that moment, even though there is often hurt from the wrong done, especially if it’s wrong done to a person, there is also, or should also be, joy in having the wrong come into the light.  To put it concretely, you may still punish your child for stealing $20 to help them to understand that stealing is wrong.  But at the same time there should be some mitigation for that child coming forward in honesty to admit the wrong he or she has done, because that child had the courage to come into the light so that he or she could receive mercy.  When we come into the light and reveal our sins to God (who knows them already), He is merciful to us.  Hopefully we can also live that way and show God’s love by being merciful when a wrong is brought into the light to us.

Anchored to the Cross

Feast of the Triumph of the Holy Cross

            Just a couple of weeks ago my parents moved to a different house for the first time since 1988.  They didn’t move too far, only from Williamston, on the east side of Lansing, to DeWitt, on the west side of Lansing, but moving, no matter how far, is always an ordeal.  In early August we celebrated the August and September birthdays as the last time we were going to be at the old house as a family.  Some of the stuff was moved already, pictures were taken down, and there were lots of boxes.  Little things became more pronounced, knowing that I would probably never see this house again.

           

When we’ve been in one place a long time, we can overlook some of the real treasures that are right in front of us, because it’s always been there.  Take, for example, the stained glass window just east of the niche for the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe.  There’s a cross there.  I noticed that the first time I came in the church and was looking around at how beautiful everything is.  What I missed, and maybe you have too, is that the cross is on an island, and the waves are rolling around it, and there is an anchor attached to that cross.  I just noticed it earlier this week as I was preparing for this homily.

            The anchor is an ancient Christian symbol.  When the Christians were being persecuted, they didn’t want to give away who they were.  The anchor was a perfect way to show they were Christians, without giving it away to those who didn’t know.  The anchor has the cross in it, so they were professing that they were followers of Jesus, the crucified and risen one, but with a common symbol in use at the time. 

            The anchor was also a symbol of hope.  This may have been based on the Letter to the Hebrews that states, “This [hope] we have as an anchor of the soul, sure and firm.”  The anchor was also the hope for those who were sailing that they would remain where they were, where they knew they were safe, and not be tossed into shallow waters where they might run aground, or into deeper, uncharted waters, without any idea of where they were.

            It is fitting then, that the anchor is attached to the cross, because the cross is where we find our hope, and if we are attached firmly to the cross, then we do not need to worry about running aground and sinking, or getting lost on the wide-open seas.  Our goal, as Christians, is to be firmly holding on to the cross.  Now, that might seem odd to say.  Why would we say that the instrument of Jesus’ horrible death be our hope?  For the same reason that we call the Friday of the Lord’s Passion Good Friday: the cross, and Jesus attached to it, became the way that God made salvation available to us.  The curse (or malediction) of being nailed to the cross (as Deuteronomy 21 states), the curse that belonged by right to us, became the blessing (or benediction) of eternal life won for us by God-made-Man.  In the first reading, seraph serpents were the curse for the Israelites grumbling, but the bronze serpent lifted high for all to see became the way that the Israelites were healed.  Jesus alluded to that in the Gospel today, saying that the Son of Man was to become the new bronze serpent, lifted high for all to see.  Though killing God, deicide, which we continue to bring about by our sins, deserves the worst punishment of all, Jesus took our sins upon Himself, and, lifted for all to see, is the means of our reward.  We should have been damned to Hell for killing God, and yet we were offered eternal life in heaven instead.

            For us to gain that reward, we have to be anchored to Jesus.  Today we will baptize two infants.  We might wonder why we should make such a powerful choice for two persons who cannot speak for themselves.  Shouldn’t we wait to adulthood?  Shouldn’t they choose for themselves?  Many of our Protestant brothers and sisters do wait until the child is old enough to speak for itself.  We all know, too well, I would guess, the waves that want to throw us around on the sea of life.  We are tempted to greed and worship of money; to think that we are the center of the universe in pride; to tear down others with our words or actions; to misuse our gift of sexuality outside of marriage; and so many other temptations.  If we do not have an anchor, we will sink, or be thrown out into deep, uncharted waters.  If these children are not anchored to the cross, it will be so much more likely that they will be lost.  But, as an act of love, their parents are connecting them to Jesus by this Sacrament, and by the solemn promise they make to God and in our presence, that they will help their children to continue to cling to Christ by bringing them to Mass every week, by living a Christ-centered life, and by works of charity.  They are promising to strengthen the rope, with God’s grace, which is the connection between the cross and the anchor.  If the children and their parents stay close to Jesus, then the children will be ready for the Sacraments of Confirmation and the Eucharist, to which Baptism is also oriented. 

            We who have been fully initiated, who are striving to live that Christ-centered life, are also reminded of how we need to be anchored to the cross.  Maybe we have not fulfilled the promises at our baptism.  Maybe we’re not coming to Mass each week.  Maybe we’re greedy or prideful.  Maybe we tear down others with our words and actions.  Maybe we misuse our sexuality outside of marriage.  Maybe we don’t live our faith outside of the walls of this church.  The Sacrament of Penance, which we offer each week, is where Jesus Himself re-anchors us to the cross, so that we can be safe in His love.   Maybe, because we have grown up with Catholicism, we have forgotten the treasures that we have.  I invite you to re-anchor yourself to the cross, and find not condemnation and death, but blessing and life!

"Baby, Don't Hurt Me..."

Within certain age groups, if a person introduces the phrase, “What is love?” and then pauses, the response of those listening will be, whether out loud or in silence, “Baby don’t hurt me,” following the lyrics of the song by Haddaway.  They may even do a headshake gesture.  But this song betrays a real question in modern culture today: what is love?

            We talk about love in a variety of ways, while using the same word.  We love our family.  We love our boyfriend or girlfriend or spouse.  We love our pets.  We love TV shows.  We love songs.  We love particular foods.  Each of these examples of love shows different ways that we apply the word love to different persons or objects.  The temptation is that all of these meanings get blended into one, so that when we say we love a particular band, that meaning of love also seeps into what is meant when talking about a family member.

            In our Gospel today, we hear the oft-quoted, oft-displayed passage John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.”  Most everyone can quote it, the passage is so ubiquitous.  And yet, as we delve into the meaning, we see something profound about God and about love.

            What this passage expresses about God is pretty clear: God loves us enough that He is willing to send His only Son so that we can have eternal life, rather than eternal damnation.  That’s a very strong love!  God is willing to do everything He can, even humbling Himself to take on human nature and join it to His own divine nature, so that the God who, in His divinity could not be looked at or touched, could not be present to us, face to face, and could cry, could stub His toe, and could bleed.  The God who created the universe and whom the whole universe cannot contain, spends nine months in the womb of the Blessed Mother, and then lives among us with all the limits of human nature, except sin.  That is a powerful love.

            What we learn about love, then, is that it’s not just a feeling.  It’s not simply an emotion.  And love means sacrifice.  Because when Jesus, the Eternal Logos, became incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man, the cross immediately overshadowed him.  Yes, the Jews could have freely accepted Jesus, and some certainly did, but God knew from all eternity, because all time is as the present to Him, that the Chosen People, His People, would for the most part reject Him.  Most of His people rejected the light when it came into the world, because they “preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil.”  These are tough words, but they are no less true than what John tells us about God loving the world.

            God’s love for us shows us that to truly love means to sacrifice.  God’s love means pouring oneself out for another, as Jesus does eternally for us.  He pours Himself out for us in the Incarnation as He did not grasp at His divinity, but emptied Himself and took on human flesh.  Jesus pours Himself out for us on the cross as He gives all that He is, the God-Man, to atone for our sins.  Jesus pours Himself out eternally for us in heaven, pleading for us at the right hand of the Father.  Jesus is forever sacrificing Himself for us to the Father, not that he dies any longer, but that His very life, even after the resurrection, is still a continuous gift in whole to the Father. 

            That is the true meaning of love: sacrifice.   We see it in so many ways, big and small: we see sacrificial love in realizing that your spouse or children may be glued to the couch during the month of March, watching NCAA basketball, and then going out of your way to pick up the slack so that they can enjoy watching March Madness; we see it in choosing to go to a movie that you know you hate but that you also know your friend or spouse loves.  Love as sacrifice is lived out in caring of a sick family member or friend at all hours of the day or night without any thought of self.  We see it in the love that remains faithful to the marriage covenant, even when one person is not being faithful, or maybe has even left.  There are so many other examples, too, of sacrifices of many other kinds that people make for each other, joining Jesus on that cross on Calvary.

            The danger for us is that in a culture where love is used for the union between a man and a woman in holy matrimony, as well as the union of mouth with hot, greasy, delicious pizza, the meanings can meld together.  Our love of pizza, as good as it is, does not entail sacrifice.  We ought not to do anything for pizza.  We ought to be willing, at least, to give up everything for a spouse or a family member.  We use the same word, but the meanings are as different as night and day.  And if we’re not careful, they meld together, so that love becomes: what can you do for me?  How can you bring pleasure to my life?  Of course, love will bring pleasure and benefits.  But those come as the result of sacrifice, not instead of sacrifice, just as the eternal reward of heaven is made possible not instead of the crucifixion, but only through the crucifixion. 

            Our beloved patron, St. John the Evangelist, could tell us about love which entails sacrifice because, though he at first ran away, he came back to the foot of the cross to see just how far God’s love was willing to go.  He knew and could write that true love means giving all of yourself to another, because He was there when God’s love gave up everything in Jesus, even His own life, so that we could return to friendship with God.  What is love?  Love is the full gift of your very self: all that you are, all that you treasure, all that is dear to you for the other.  To other persons, yes, but first and foremost to the God who is love.