Homily for Thursday, Week 5 of Easter

Homily for Thursday
5th Week of Easter

May 2, 2024
John 15: 9-11
Christian Brothers, St. Joseph Residence, N.R.

“As the Father loves me, so I also love you” (John 15: 9).

The Holy Trinity (Antonio de Pareda)

Love is in the present tense in those words of Jesus to his disciples—to us.  The Father has loved the Son eternally and continues to love him in time, to love the Son incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth.  That love is complete, perfect, and without limit.

And that’s how Jesus, the Son incarnate, loves us.  He’s loved us eternally, before we existed—now that’s a mystery of faith—and loves us now that we do exist.  We are the reason for the incarnation:  “God so loved the world,” which means above all the people in the world, “that he gave his only Son” (3:16), so that the Son might share their eternal love with us.  The Last Supper begins with Jesus’ “loving his own in the world and loving them to the end,” which could also be translated as loving them to the utmost or the extreme (13:1)—as much as the Father loves him.

The Son responds to the Father’s love by keeping his commandments, especially the commandment to love us and to save us even tho we don’t deserve it, except in the sense that God wants us to be loved and to remain in his love—here, now, and for eternity.  When Jesus tells us to have faith in God and faith also in himself (14:1), part of that faith is belief in their love for us.  Don’t we often find that unbelievable?  Part of our growth in discipleship is just to believe that God truly loves us, that Jesus Savior of the world truly loves us, has chosen us, and desires that his joy remain in us—completely (15:11), to the utmost.