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.
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