Love: The new commandment!

Today is the Fifth Sunday of Easter and our gospel reading today is another short one, but perhaps it is one of the most beautiful, but often misunderstood or worse, even unaccepted teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ. You can read it in John 13:31-33a, 34-35 about the New Commandment.

“31 When [Judas] had left the cenacle, Jesus said, “Now is the Son of Man glorified and God is glorified in him. 32 If God is glorified in him, “God will also glorify him in himself, and he will glorify him at once. 33 My children I will be with you only a little while longer. 34 I will give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another. 35 This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

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If you have been a faithful reader to our Sunday gospel articles, you will come to realize that there are three kinds of love: Eros, the love between man and a woman; Filial love, the love we share with our families; and Agape, a divine kind of love that few Christians have yet understood, simply because we all think as humans think while God thinks the way God thinks. It is a kind of unconditional love that we can only feel when we start loving God in the manner that He teaches us in this new commandment.

To get a deeper understanding of God’s Love. Let us open our Bibles to 1 Corinthians 13: 1-13, “If I speak in human and angelic tongues, but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal. 2 And if I have the gift of prophecy, and have comprehended all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, [love] is not pompous, it is not inflated, 5 it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick tempered, it does not brood over injury, 6 it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoice with the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never fails. If there are prophecies, they will be brought to nothing, if tongues, they will cease; if knowledge, it will be brought to nothing.

9 For we know partially and we prophecy partially, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things. 12 At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully as I am fully known, 13 faith, hope, love remain these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

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1 Corinthians was written by St. Paul and if you want to know where this place is today, it is 78 kilometers from Athens and is now called the New Corinth in the Gulf of Corinth in Greece. If you read deeper into the Bible, you’d probably ask, how could St. Paul have understood the Love of God when if you read in Acts  he was Saul of Tarsus where during the stoning of St. Stephen, the first martyr to die in the name of Jesus Christ, those who stoned him placed their cloaks at his feet? Yes Saul was a Pharisee who persecuted the new and emerging Christian community.

But we know that while pursuing Christians on the road to Damascus, a brilliant light struck Saul and he fell off his horse and became blind. It was our Lord Jesus Christ who asked Saul, “Saul, Saul why do you persecute me?” This was his first written encounter with our Lord Jesus Christ who already ascended into heaven. Then like Abraham and Moses before him, our Lord Jesus changed his name from Saul to Paul and St. Paul is responsible for the spread of Christianity all over the Mediterranean and the world.

I have no doubt that the Holy Spirit played a key role in the conversion of St. Paul that eventually like all the Apostles, except St. John, they were all martyred and died in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. I exhort you to open your Bible to 1 Corinthians and examine your conscience where do you as a Catholic fall short in the teaching of St. Paul about love? Yes, even in Eros or Human Love, we fail miserably; the same with Filial love.

Many of us experience love in so many faces. A material girl for instance would love a man because he gives her gifts or supports here. But is that really true love? Then the man marries the girl… and when the excitement dies out… only the material love remains and even that is not assured.

In my book, love is what we can find in the prayer of St. Francis… “If there is hatred let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon… O master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console…to be understood as to understand…to be loved as to love.” God loves all of us. Amen!

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