Knowing And Experiencing Ourselves As Utterly Lovable, and Loved.
Homily Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year B
Can any of us say that we know and experience ourselves as utterly loved by God? Isn’t it true that in our brokenness and woundedness, we struggle with knowing ourselves as lovable, at least for some of the time. Most often when we consider the love of God for us, we raise within ourselves all kinds of objections to whether God can love us. The sadness is that we long for love and yet it is difficult for us to allow ourselves to experience or believe in the love of God for us. There is a fragility in each of us when it comes to love.
Perhaps we could try to see something of ourselves in Cornelius and his household, those first Gentiles to whom the Gospel was preached. Not only are they our ancestors in the Faith, but we can allow ourselves to be surprised at how God, out of love for us, generously includes us in his plan of salvation, as he did for Cornelius and his household. It would be hard to overstate how controversial the event described in this first reading from the Acts of the Apostles would have been in the early Church. When we read it these days it comes across as a bit bland and matter of fact, whereas for those early Christians it was earth-shattering.
From our perspective today, it seems obvious that God has chosen all people to be saved through the coming of Jesus, his Son - the Messiah promised through the Jewish people. But for the first Christians, who were all Jews who had come to believe in Jesus, the very idea that non-Jews could be baptised, without first becoming fully Jewish, was mind-blowing and provocative. And even after this event, the early Church continued to struggle with this openness to the Gentiles. You can see evidence of this in the rest of the Acts of the Apostles and in the letters of St Paul.
So, in this first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, we have St Peter saying he has come to realize the truth that God does not show partiality - he does not have favourites, but that anyone of any nationality who fears God and does what is right, is acceptable to him. While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit came upon all who were listening, showing clearly that God had chosen these Gentiles for himself. The Jews who were with Peter were amazed, another indication of how shocking this was for them. Then Peter, seeing what had happened, commanded that they be baptised.
This choosing of the Gentiles - the Roman centurion, Cornelius and his household, illustrates Jesus’s words in the Gospel: “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you ...” God is passionately in love with the whole human race and longs to draw all people into a love relationship with himself. What is true for the whole human race, is true for each one of us individually and personally.
It might be hard for us to enter into the truth that Jesus has chosen us and calls us his friends. Too often our lack of self-esteem and woundedness prevent us from receiving God’s love and attention. We too easily fall into the trap of thinking that we need to sort ourselves out first, before God will love us or draw near to us, or even more commonly, before we can approach God. Even though this is the exact opposite of the truth—in fact, it is a heresy—our flawed human experience of conditional love and friendship gets in the way of us entering into this love relationship with God.
In my experience of accompanying people in the spiritual life, I would be bold enough to say that if you were to be able to put yourself in the presence of God, and know his overwhelming, unconditional love for you, without doubt or reservation, you would be truly remarkable, because it is no small thing for us. And yet that is the goal of the spiritual life—to enter into this truth. The essence of the Gospel is that God loves us first, unconditionally, and having known God’s love, we are called to love one another.
The second reading from the first Letter of St John and again, the Gospel, over and over, tell us that we are loved and we are to love one another. In fact, the word love appears 18 times in these two readings together. St John, echoing that God loves us first, says that love is not that we love God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation of our sins. Our knowing God, who is love, and knowing God’s love for us, means that we are called to love each other. God is love and we who are loved by God, are commanded to love.
This commandment to love is tough and challenging. We could rightly ask: Is it possible to be commanded to love? Can we be expected to start feeling something that we don’t feel? Pope Benedict XVI addressed this very question in his encyclical, “Deus Caritas Est”, “God is Love”. He says, Certainly, “God does not demand of us a feeling that we ourselves are incapable of producing”.
So, what is this love that we are commanded? The answer to this question is based on the correct understanding of the nature of love. Love is not a feeling, a sentiment, an emotion. Love is an act of the will; it is a choice, a decision. We cannot be ordered to “like” someone or to “fall in love”, but we can “choose to love”. We can even choose to love our enemies.
This word, love, needs some explanation, because, if you think of it, it is so commonly and easily used today, without taking into account what it means. The word for love in Greek found in this Gospel is agape. In Scripture this agape love is the highest form of love and is contrasted with eros which is romantic love, and philia, which is brotherly or friendship love. Agape is understood as unconditional, sacrificial love, the love with which God loves.
It is this agape love that can be chosen. To love is to will the good for the other and do everything in your power to bring it about. True love, love in the Jesus sense, is entirely unselfish and giving to the other. St Paul in his famous Hymn to Love in the First Letter to the Corinthians makes it clear that love is the complete opposite of self-seeking. Love is entirely directed to the other. Love involves a sacrifice, a kind of laying down of one’s life for the one who is the object of one’s love.
Why, then, do we love? Our love is based on our experience of God’s love for us. The joy of being loved makes us want to respond to that love. And God has loved us first. If we are finding it difficult to love as we are commanded to do, it may well be that we are not allowing ourselves to receive this love of God.
To allow ourselves to experience God’s love, to put our hearts and minds in the space of God’s love takes discipline and intention on our part. Our lack of self-esteem, our woundedness, our busyness, and the many distractions of life, can dull our experience and sensitivity to God’s loving presence. We experience God’s love for us as an ongoing reality each time we receive the sacraments, but also each time we reflect on the fact that he is keeping us in existence. This personal experience enables us both to understand love and want to share it.
There is an extraordinary dignity in being called friends by Jesus. Like love, the word friendship is used often these days. Real friendship cannot be reduced to connections on social media. To understand the friendship that Jesus offers us, we might do well to think of true friendships that we have experienced. The friendship that Jesus offers is an intimate sharing in his life, in which we are trusted with what is most precious to him. To allow ourselves to be loved by God, and to love as Jesus loves us, and to enter into friendship with Jesus, requires a grace. Let’s pray for this grace and open ourselves to this love of God. Let’s be surprised by God’s love for us, and respond by answering Jesus’ great commandment to love one another, as he has loved us.