holy cross sermon for easter 5 / may 10 2009

Our Lady of light and life, pray for us! (From here.)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today’s readings set before us the great mystery at the center of our faith: the mystery of love, and the great commandment of Christ: that we love one another as he has loved us.

There is perhaps a seeming incongruity in the commandment to love: namely that it is a commandment. How can love be undertaken in obedience? This apparent incongruity arises from our aptitude to misconstrue love as a sentiment, as something purely touching our affections, our FEELINGS.

But while love does indeed touch our feelings, while it does dispose us to feel a certain way toward the object of our love, yet this feeling is a symptom of love and does not constitute love itself.

Indeed the love that is enjoined on us as Christians persists through whatever we feel. And we know that our feelings can be fickle, that we are prone variously and at times to feelings of elation, satisfaction, disappointment, despondency, and everything else. Yet obedience to Christ’s commandment to love is possible no matter how we feel. In the Epistle reading, St. John says “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren” (v. 16).

We learn what true love is through the contemplation of Christ. When we consider Jesus, his life and his death for us, we come to know what it is truly to love. We come to see the connection between love and life – that love is the gift of life; and likewise how “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren. He who does not love abides in death” (v. 14) – and so why it is that “any one who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him” (v. 15). Because love is the gift of life for the beloved. “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us.”

So likewise we see the reason for the Church’s otherwise puzzlingly dogged devotion to LIFE wherever she finds it, her persistent proclamation of the dignity of every human person, no matter who they are, no matter how good or wicked, no matter how sick or malformed, and no matter how apparently hopeless a person’s situation may be. The unchanging truth of the Gospel, to which we bear witness, is that every person has a God-given dignity, integrity, and beauty, and that the gift of life is to be cherished and defended wherever we find it, from conception until natural death. Because “by this we know love,” that God has given us life – even the life of his only and eternal Son.

Here too we see the Church’s lament at the cultural situation of our day, where we find love having grown cold, and where all to often we see a cynical disregard for the gift of life and the dignity of the human person. Before we congratulate ourselves on being enlightened, modern people, we should remember that there have been more people killed in war in the last century than in all the wars of the rest of human history put together. Mothers and fathers kill their own children in the womb. Young people speak of murder with truly horrifying nonchalance. Movies, music, and magazines celebrate death and violence. Fashionable clothing is emblazoned with skulls and images of violence and invective. Our culture begins to think of euthanasia as a convenient way to rid ourselves of the elderly and the infirm, the lives of whom we have so devalued, or who have so devalued their own lives, as to be unable to see them as anything but problems to be solved by death. We have a criminal justice system that is very often more interested in getting convictions and being “tough on crime” than it is concerned with honestly pursuing justice. Right here in Dallas, thanks to the efforts of our District Attorney, Craig Watkins, over 20 men have been exonerated through DNA evidence that was not available – or that was simply not admitted – at the time when cases went to trial. Some of them spent 20 years or more in prison for crimes they did not commit. Some were on death row. How many innocent people have we executed over the years? Why does this not bother us more?

“But if any one has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and in truth.” (1 John 3.17f).

In order truly to love, one must cultivate an open heart; one must come to Christ with an open heart. The Lord spoke through the prophet Ezekiel, saying that in the days of Messiah, “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36.26). Jesus Christ is the one whose heart was truly open, the one who loved God perfectly and completely, who held on to the promises of God, to his eternal communion with the Father, no matter what the world hurled at him, through slander and abuse, through derision and scorn, through being scourged and beaten and nailed to a tree, through his three hours of bleeding and suffocation, Jesus showed us what loving communion with the Father looks like; he showed us the Father’s gift of life, and he empowers us to receive and to offer that same divine life, to ransom the world from its enthrallment to suffering and corruption and death. Through his denunciation and the heartbreaking cries of “Crucify him! Crucify him!” – even as he was being nailed up, the Lord announced the dignity of human nature, and his gift of divine life, in the conviction of his prayer, “Father, forgive them.”

Through the oblation of the cross, the gift of divine life was poured out on all flesh. That is what the gift of the Holy Spirit means – the gift of God’s own inner life, the gift of eternal and mutual communion-in-love of Father and Son. “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you. I will not leave you desolate; [but] I will come to you. Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more, but you will see me; because I live, you will live also. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me; and he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” (Jn. 14.15ff).

In Christ alone we not only learn what love is, but we receive the power to love others, as God has loved us, and to bear witness, in our own time and place, to the love and mercy of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.