SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER "B"

SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER (Year  “b”)

“Love one another as I have loved you” (Jn. 15, 9 – 17)

I suppose you remember Oscar Hammerstein, the man who wrote the lyrics of “The Sound of Music”. The last days of this splendid artist were marked by his struggle with cancer to which he finally succumbed. While he was in hospital, Mary Martin who was the lead actress/singer of the stage production of “The Sound of Music” visited him. They chatted for some time and as she rose to leave, Oscar Hammerstein handed her a piece of paper, saying, “I was waiting to give you this little something. Take it.” Mary Martin took it and went out of the room. She opened that little paper and on she read:

“A bell is no bell till you ring it

A song is no song till you sing it

And love in your heart wasn’t put there to stay

Love isn’t love till you give it away.”

For many of us, “I love you” is one of the few phrases we remembrer (and have used) in any language besides our mother tongue. St. Paul said that love is the greatest of the virtues. Without it all else is sounding brass and tinkling symbol. We are made for love; without it we are lost and lonely. Love gives us the power to move into new worlds of meaning and doing. We see the world and its needs; we see our needs and ourselves more clearly, more gently. Serving others with love heals our own selves.

The classical Greek understanding of love was friendship and erotic love. Friendship and erotic love people have more or less in spite of themselves. They can avoid or curtail it, but they cannot make it simply happen. This kind of love also depends a lot upon luck as regards finding the right sort of person and the right sort of circumstances. Erotic love can be a most enobling ecstasy or it can be a degrading psychological disease. It can raise dull prosaic lives of prudent calculation into a realm of uninhibited rapture. But it can also be the ground of fear, putting human lives at the mercy of moods and unreasonable conduct. An infatuated lad will do anything, even rob or hurt people if his girl asks him to. {This is only by way of illustrating my point}. Star-crossed lovers are prepared to go through hell fire; the more you advise them the more they’ll carry on. This is known as the “Romeo & Juliet effect”. [I’m not a professional psychologist.]

So, friendship and erotic love produce both praise and dispraise. Both loves have been involved in doing both admirable and abominable things. Therefore, this kind of love is not an automatic force for good or evil. Its force for good or evil depends upon the virtues or vices of the persons involved.

  So, this kind of love is ambivalent. This is why Jesus was not referring to erotic love as the supreme principle of the life that God calls us to. Not that Jesus was unaware or depreciative of this kind of love. He did not see it as significantly related to his message. Love that is largely spontaneous and unpredictable cannot be a commandment. And love that is more or less particular or exclusive cannot be an appeal for universal love.  The heart of the problem is the problem of the heart.

So let us focus our attention on our dear Lord Jesus Christ. In the midst of human life, God reaches out to us in the person of Jesus Christ. In Jesus, God and man meet in a total giving of selves. This is the supreme norm of the moral life. Jesus’ person, words and actions are our guide. He is the standard by which our purposes are judged. We must keep in mind that Jesus is one of us, knowing our pains and joys and also revealing our deepest possibilities. How does he do it ?

Jesus couldn’t have done everything in a life span of 33 years. For instance, he was not a great painter or a philosopher or a statesman or a great husband, though we must admit he was a teacher “par excellence.”  But the point is that Jesus concentrated in himself all the power and energy that activates every profession or vocation. And he concentrated that power and energy to a degree so high as to make it fit to be used by God. This power was the power of his self-sacrificing love. And isn’t this at the base of all our avocations?

Jesus, Son of God, son of Mary, was a man who tested life and was tested by it, searching out life’s meaning by listening to what was worth living and dying for. And he lived and died trusting that life and death were not bad jokes.

Imitating Christ is not a piece of mimicry but a challenge to live our human adventure as genuinely as he did.

PRAYER  (from “Morning, Noon and Night.”)

Father, my Father, enlarge my heart that it may be big enough to receive the greatness of your love. Stretch my heart that it may take into it all those who with me around the world believe in Jesus Christ. Stretch it that it may take into it all those who do not know him, but who are my responsibility because I know him. And stretch my heart that it may take in all those who are not lovely in my eyes, and whose hands I do not want to touch; through Jesus my Saviour.