Top photo caption: Mateo Gobo photography/magnific.com
By Father Garry Koch
In his Gospel narrative, John often places a strong emphasis on hearing and heeding the voice of Jesus, and much less stress on following commandments. This shift in the paradigm for discipleship from the Synoptic Gospels is reflected in the singular commandment that John records Jesus speaking: “love one another.” This love, grounded in the love between the Father and the Son, and then further expressed in the love that the Father has for us in sending the Son to draw all things to himself, indicates that it is only in and through expressed and lived agape (love for the welfare of the other) that we truly express discipleship and can love God.
While so much of our popular music, regardless of the genre, focuses on love, and given the continuous use of the word, love, in so many cultural settings, one would get the idea that we are a people who authentically love one another. Perhaps the depths of the Gospel message has indeed taken root in each one of us.
Alas, however, such is not the case. We sing of love, write sweeping poems about love, produce tear-inducing movies, plays, and television shows that focus on love, but we do not love one another.
Perhaps this judgment sounds harsh and, maybe even “unloving,” but it is true.
Our social media is filled with hate-filled, arrogant, and self-serving libelous comments about family members, ex-partners and friends, and even people unknown to us who posted something we dislike or find offensive. We file lawsuits, acquire restraining orders, and demand apologies. We find it easy to abandon relationships and to ghost others when we want to avoid hard realities.
At the Last Supper, as delivers this commandment to love one another, he already prepared them for the challenges that were coming their way. He had just told them that one of them would betray him, and Judas left the dinner. He told Simon Peter that he would deny knowing him, and despite the warning and Peter’s strong objection, it happens in just a few hours. The others fled in fear and cowered back in this room with the doors locked. Only the beloved disciple stood at the cross.
They continued, we expect, to love one another. But it was because they knew the love that Jesus had for them, and his repeated admonitions to them to in fact love one another, that they were able to get through that fateful weekend intact.
In the world today there are those forces who are opposed to the proclamation of the Gospel, the place of the church in the marketplace, and the influence of Christian and specifically Catholic moral principles. We have recently even seen the pope “corrected” for his explanation of the teaching of the church and the call of the Gospel. This came from those outside and even within the church itself.
All of this sews disunity and disunity is both an outgrowth and a further expression of distrust and not grounded in love.
The challenge for the Christian is to step out of this vicious cycle and to return to the heart of the proclamation of Jesus.
However, this is no easy task. We have reduced love to romantic passion or an expression of our favorite foods, sports teams, or pastimes.
We are called to love in ways that supersede the banalities of post-modern society. Love, grounded in the love of the Father for the Son and of the Son for the world, is a total giving of self for the welfare of the other. It holds the other in highest regard and has no care for the consequences of that love for the self.
The fullest expression of such love is, of course, the cross. Jesus died on the cross for our salvation as the expression of the desire of God to share in our humanity and to liberate us from the constraints of sin, which is always forged in the primacy of self-love that lilts into hatred.
Let us strive to love first authentically within our homes, our extended families, and then to find that love as an expression of our encounters with one another.
Father Garry Koch is pastor of St. Benedict Parish, Holmdel.