During these past Sundays we have been meditating on the presence of the Lord to his community (Sunday II-III) and the personalized care He gives His flock (Sunday IV). This Sunday, we meditate on our response to His love. On the night when He was betrayed, the Lord gave us the sacrament of His love and the command to love one another. In the Sacrament of the Eucharist and of the Priesthood, we are given the ability to re-present the kind of love He showed on the cross. In the command to love, we -- His family -- are given a distinct life-style that will also serve as our badge of identity.
Read the relevant articles here and use the following as your guide for reflection.
1. The Black-Eyed Peas' Song "Where is the love?" is a young people's protest to the perceived lack of love in the world. It indicts the world's hate, violence and lies.
Reflect: As a member of Christ's community commanded to be an example of love in a world that sorely needs it, how do you react to the song?
2. The kind of love that the Lord demands from his disciples is nothing less than the kind of self-less love he showed on the cross, that love which responds to the two-fold commandment of love: love of God above all, and love for the neighbor as oneself.
Reflect: Benedict XVI in "Deus caritas est" explains the importance of the Eucharist in starting our journey towards a love that fulfills the two-fold commandment of love:
(I)n sacramental communion I become one with the Lord, like all the other communicants. As Saint Paul says, "Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread" (1 Cor 10:17). Union with Christ is also union with all those to whom he gives himself. I cannot possess Christ just for myself; I can belong to him only in union with all those who have become, or who will become, his own. Communion draws me out of myself towards him, and thus also towards unity with all Christians. We become "one body", completely joined in a single existence. Love of God and love of neighbour are now truly united: God incarnate draws us all to himself. We can thus understand how agape also became a term for the Eucharist: there God's own agape comes to us bodily, in order to continue his work in us and through us. Only by keeping in mind this Christological and sacramental basis can we correctly understand Jesus' teaching on love. The transition which he makes from the Law and the Prophets to the twofold commandment of love of God and of neighbour, and his grounding the whole life of faith on this central precept, is not simply a matter of morality-something that could exist apart from and alongside faith in Christ and its sacramental re-actualization. Faith, worship and ethos are interwoven as a single reality which takes shape in our encounter with God's agape. Here the usual contraposition between worship and ethics simply falls apart. "Worship" itself, Eucharistic communion, includes the reality both of being loved and of loving others in turn. A Eucharist which does not pass over into the concrete practice of love is intrinsically fragmented. Conversely, as we shall have to consider in greater detail below, the "commandment" of love is only possible because it is more than a requirement. Love can be "commanded" because it has first been given. (Deus caristas est, 14)
How do you see the importance of the Eucharist in your becoming a loving person?
3. Jesus commands his disciples to love the other as they have been loved by Him. Love for the other is therefore a response to that love experienced in the Lord Himself "who has loved me and has given his life for me."
Benedict XVI explains it this way:
It (the love of neighbor) consists in the very fact that, in God and with God, I love even the person whom I do not like or even know. This can only take place on the basis of an intimate encounter with God, an encounter which has become a communion of will, even affecting my feelings. Then I learn to look on this other person not simply with my eyes and my feelings, but from the perspective of Jesus Christ. His friend is my friend. Going beyond exterior appearances, I perceive in others an interior desire for a sign of love, of concern. This I can offer them not only through the organizations intended for such purposes, accepting it perhaps as a political necessity. Seeing with the eyes of Christ, I can give to others much more than their outward necessities; I can give them the look of love which they crave. Here we see the necessary interplay between love of God and love of neighbour which the First Letter of John speaks of with such insistence. If I have no contact whatsoever with God in my life, then I cannot see in the other anything more than the other, and I am incapable of seeing in him the image of God. But if in my life I fail completely to heed others, solely out of a desire to be "devout" and to perform my "religious duties", then my relationship with God will also grow arid. It becomes merely "proper", but loveless. Only my readiness to encounter my neighbour and to show him love makes me sensitive to God as well. Only if I serve my neighbour can my eyes be opened to what God does for me and how much he loves me. The saints-consider the example of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta-constantly renewed their capacity for love of neighbour from their encounter with the Eucharistic Lord, and conversely this encounter acquired its realism and depth in their service to others. Love of God and love of neighbour are thus inseparable, they form a single commandment. But both live from the love of God who has loved us first. No longer is it a question, then, of a "commandment" imposed from without and calling for the impossible, but rather of a freely-bestowed experience of love from within, a love which by its very nature must then be shared with others. Love grows through love. Love is "divine" because it comes from God and unites us to God; through this unifying process it makes us a "we" which transcends our divisions and makes us one, until in the end God is "all in all" (1 Cor 15:28). (Deus caritas est, 18)
Reflect: We experience the love of the Lord through contact with Him in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Do you visit Him in the Blessed Sacrament?
