A homily for the Fifth Sunday of Easter, May 18, 2025
Acts 14:21-27, Revelation 21:1-5a, John 13:31-33a, 34-35
None of us can love ice cream, no matter how vigorously or energetically foot-stompingly any of us insists we absolutely do.
Not vanilla, chocolate or strawberry. Not cookie dough or coconut or fudge ripple or key lime pie. Not even chocolate chip mint!
None of us can love ice cream, though any and all of us can really, really like it.
We can’t love ice cream because ice cream can’t love us back.
We toss around the word “love” — and, unfortunately, the word “hate” — all too often, with little regard for either concept’s intensity. Love and hate are matters of life and death, the truest matters of life and death, the deepest wishes and actions that either preserve life or deprive it from some person or some other of God’s creatures.
We can’t hate our jobs; we can detest them. Or we can look forward to how we earn our daily bread, but we cannot love our careers.
We can’t love our hairstyles; we can admire and appreciate the way we look in the mirror. Likewise our fashions. Likewise any of our possessions and other tchotchkes.
Love requires shared emotion, an exchange of feelings and an interchange of action. Love requires and underpins relationships.
In our Hollywood-shaped American culture, we probably think of romantic attachment first when the notion of love among people comes up.
And that’s wonderful. Really, it is.
But the love Jesus demands, as chronicled today in the 13th chapter of John’s Gospel, sets a much higher bar. Stratospheric, but achievable.
I give you a new commandment: love one another.
As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.
Interestingly, though, it’s John’s 15th chapter that quotes Jesus becoming more specific:
No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
That’s the highest bar of all.
That’s how Jesus loved the Apostles. That’s how Jesus continues to love all of us, all the time. His excruciating execution on the cross saved every man, woman and child who ever lived or will live.
In a little over a week, we Americans will honor the memories of those men and women in uniform who laid down their lives for our freedoms and way of life. Many of them did it because they were inspired by the example of Jesus. All of them did it because they loved, and were loved by, their comrades-in-arms.
They loved and were loved back, even if those stoically taciturn men never used the word.
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother…
They loved through relationships.
They loved as a family does.
And when we take family love as an example, we also begin to recognize one of Christlike love’s little quirks:
We don’t have to like each other, not all the time. Any brother or sister who ever punched a sibling in the shoulder for grabbing the last slice of pizza can attest to that.
Love always, yes. Be best buds with … yeah, well…
God’s Divine Wisdom dictated that no two of us are totally alike. Not even identical twins. Yes, we’re made in God’s image and likeness, but the billions of noses and feet and melanin levels — let alone the googolplex of hair strands — they all testify that God loves us in our differences and through our differences. That’s because God’s love is all-encompassing.
Human love and tolerance, not so much. Not always.
But even on days when we may rub each other the wrong way, we cannot hate or be indifferent (which can be more deadly than hate). Whenever we’re annoyed or we ourselves are annoying, the Christlike solution is to wish each other a good day. Never, never do we hope someone plunges into a bottomless pit, whether literal or figurative.
Whenever we decide that liking someone is not an option, the proper choice is to live and let live. With kindness.
By loving God and our neighbors as ourselves. By loving each other as Christ loved us.
By loving each other as Christ loves us. Eternally.
The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.
It’s true: We often say we love a book, a delicious dinner, a piece of art or music, an experience, a car, a favorite dress, a summer night, for lack of a different word for love. We say love to describe an intense pleasure or excitement that represents love. Of all the extraordinary expressions of love in my life, I remember my son, when a teenager, said to me, “I’d die for you.” So powerful were his words that I felt simultaneously blessed and horrified. Similarly, my daughter declared she and I are the same person, a stunning example of Jesus’s ultimate commandment to love others as we love ourselves. Same goes for hate, a word communicating frustration, detestation, hurt, and such. “Je déteste l’école,” an angry student said. We often say, I’m gonna kill you, when we’re either beyond exasperation or joking. Jesus gave us the free will to use our words as we do.
What He didn’t give us is free will to act upon our frequently misused or ridiculous vocabulary. Take back the hurtful words, He may say, and walk with Him along the paths of love, be mindful of reciprocal love even when you don’t want to. Love all, including those who refuse to see divinity in others or are really emotionally incapable of reciprocating. The profound and constant love of Jesus will forgive us when we misspeak.
Thought-provoking homily, Deacon Bill.