April 28, 2013 Cycle C
We will all have a hand in making a new world come about. But we often want God to come along and wave a magic wand to make it happen. But it won’t happen that way. We have to be involved in the process. It’s just as if someone invented a medicine that would eliminate cancer. It wouldn’t help a person with cancer unless they took the medicine. In a similar way God can’t create a new world if we don’t help him. If we desire to hold on to the cancer of hatred and jealousy, and lustful pleasures, and unforgiveness, and self-righteous pride, we sabotage the whole process.
The new world will come about by living the Gospel, by sharing in Christ’s Risen Life, by loving one another as He has loved us, as He tells us in today’s Gospel. For after all, love is the ultimate transformative power especially when passed on.
Real love is not repaid but passed on. In 1971, there was an out-of-work salesman who was reduced to living out of his car. One morning he had not eaten for two days. He was incredibly hungry, so hungry that he walked into a diner in Houston, Mississippi, to order breakfast with no intent of paying for it. He couldn’t. He had no money, but he was hungry.
As he hungrily ate his breakfast, he wondered how he was going to pay for this meal or how he was going to get out of paying for this meal. When the check came, he fumbled around in his pockets pretending to have lost his wallet. The owner of the diner had already sized him up and knew he didn’t have the money. The owner came around the counter, approached the man, and bent down as if to pick up something. The owner said to the man, “Well, lookie here! Looks like you dropped this $20 bill.” Now the man had enough to pay for breakfast and a little more to keep for the road. He never forgot this totally undeserved act of generosity and goodness. He now gives to others as someone once gave to him.
Real love is passed on. To hug love to oneself is to suffocate it.
If we have doubts about how obvious the sign of love is in our community, then perhaps we need to reflect more on how Jesus is loved. The commandment to love given by Jesus is a proactive attitude towards others. It is a loving that does not nurse old wounds, old hurts, old gripes and complaints. One of the things that happen so easily in any community is for someone’s feelings to get hurt. Someone tries a new ministry. Someone doesn’t get picked to do that special reading. Or someone takes on a new assignment only to experience letdown, disappointment, a feeling of not really being appreciated. And when all that happens there is that human tendency to want to drawback to take the attitude of “I tried, but I was not appreciated. So I am not going to participate anymore.”
Love cannot work without justice. Like: real friends don’t let friends drink and drive. Real friends squeal on friends who are doing drugs. On the domestic level, real parents do not allow their child to break a commitment because something better comes up, and he wants to be there. To allow this is not loving him. To allow this makes them both feel good, but without justice, it’s the worst kind of sentimentality. On the contrary, real love with clarity says, “I know you want to go to Alice’s party but you promised to be at practice and you must keep your word. You can’t let the others down.” It’s the just thing to do.
So let us come together as a church community to accompany one another through our lives, journeying to the reign of God, supporting each other in times of joy and in sorrow, because our identity as a church family, as disciples of the Risen Christ is centered in the love that unites the Father and Son, and each of us to one another.
Amen. Amen. Msgr. Tom Adrians, Pastor Christ the King