During this joyful season of Easter, there’s perhaps a bit of a tendency or unspoken pressure to be always happy and joyful. Lent is over. Holy Week is over. All that sad and sorrowful season is gone. I don’t have to feel repentant, and that gloominess can be gone. On this note, today’s gospel lesson seems to be quite unfitting in this Easter season. Jesus in the gospel lesson brings us back to Maundy Thursday. I don’t know whose idea was this to select this gospel passage on this Fifth Sunday of Easter. But I think it’s brilliant in that we are once again reminded that the resurrection comes through death.
Jesus tells his disciples at the last supper, “Where I am going, you cannot come.” It’s a bit puzzling what he means by this. What we do know is that he’s talking about death, his own death. We can actually disagree with him and say, “Well, if it is death you’re talking about, I can get there too.” This reasoning of disagreement with Jesus then tells us that where we cannot follow Jesus is not death. It is something which goes through and beyond death that we cannot get to. Jesus is going further than death. Which means unless he first paves the way through death, no one can follow him. We are again in the shoes of the disciples, asking the same question, “Where are you going, Jesus?” We are, however, in a much better position than the disciples. We have what’s called “tradition” in our hands, something that is being handed over to us. The tradition teaches us where Jesus is going. So starting with the phrase, “Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate, died, and was buried,” it leads us “...he descended to hell, rose again from the dead and is seated at the right hand of the Father.” This reiteration of the Apostles’ Creed might sound doctrinal, giving the impression that we just gotta believe what the creed tells us to be true and memorize it. Yet, this is not and should not be the case. Jesus in today’s gospel shows us what this mythical and metaphorical expression of descending to hell and sitting at the right hand of the Father means. So what it means is that Jesus’ paving through death is God’s initiative to eternal love. Simply put, imagine Jesus pioneering, paving, and creating the way of love that goes beyond death, that unconditional love, from that which nothing, not even death can separate us. And he, through his death and resurrection, already made the way of love, not just for us but for the world. Now, we are in a completely different place than the disciples. In the context of where this teaching of Jesus takes place in today’s gospel, he tells the disciples, “Where I am going, you cannot follow NOW.” And this “now” applies to us quite differently. Our now is to follow where Jesus is going. So he says, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” We follow Jesus as we follow this new commandment of loving one another. We might say this commandment of loving one another is not something new because the Book of Deuteronomy and the Book of Leviticus also talk about about loving God and neighbor as oneself. This is true that this teaching is not new but different in that this love of God through Jesus, we Christians believe, opens up something completely new. This love brings the new creation, the new reality which God has created through Jesus. This newness of the commandment is the same newness of what St John saw in his vision in the second lesson, “I saw a new heaven and a new earth...he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away." For the two weeks, the gospel talks a lot about love. Beginning with Jesus’s question of “Do you love me?”and hearing that voice with our hearts, Jesus again talks about love. Love one another. This mutual love is the path to follow Jesus and the place where we encounter Jesus. Now, what is love? Can someone define love? Oxford Dictionary defines it as “an intense feeling of deep affection.” Do you agree with this? For me, no. This definition is quite poor, if not misleading. Thomas Aquinas, the 13th century Dominican brother, can actually help us how to understand this love. He believes that there are two requirements for love. The first is the desire for the good of the beloved. And the second is the desire for union with the beloved. So if we say we love someone, we want the good, the best for that person and we want to be together with that person. This love can be easily applied to a married couple. But this applies to any relationship. Say that I as a priest want the best for N. Which means I want to be most helpful so that N. can flourish as who she truly is. Also, I want to build a healthy loving relationship with her that is most appropriate to her and me.* I will give you an example what is not love. Say Jerome who is married to Paula believes he truly loves Sheila. He wants the best for Sheila and desires to be in union with her. Now, this is clearly wrong morally. But let’s go deeper than that by using Aquinas’s way of understanding love. Jerome’s desire for union with Sheila, which we call cheating, is inappropriate for two reasons at least. First, that desire does not bring any good to Sheila herself. Sheila becomes a part of destroying the sanctity of marriage. Second, Jerome’s desire for union with Sheila also does not bring any good to Paula but deep pain. So how do I know if I truly love that person? That is to ask myself, “Do I desire the good of that person? And do I desire union with that person, seeking to build a healthy loving relationship?” What this love does is, that is, the fruit that love bears is a community of love in which people share themselves for the good of the beloved and for deeper union with the beloved. This community of love is the church, which is based on the love of Jesus. In this light, the voice of the Holy Spirit talking to St Peter in his heart makes more sense. “Do not make a distinction between them and us.” This is the circumcised versus the uncircumcised, the chosen versus the unchosen. Love does not seek to divide you and me. Instead, it seeks to be in union with the unchosen, the undesirable. And my friends, this love desiring the good of the unchosen and the undesirable and desiring union with them is dangerous and countercultural. This love is what got Jesus killed on the cross. And this love is what brought him back to the new life in his resurrection. We are called to this particular, new love of Jesus. And we are given the grace and power to follow the way of his love. Our personal relationship with God is our source to follow Jesus’s new commandment, that Jesus desires the good of all of us, empowering us to flourish, and desiring eternal union with us. This is what we want to do out in the world. And here in church, we practice and make many mistakes as well not to hurt one another but to learn again and again how to love truly in the way Jesus does. So my friends, are you following where Jesus is going? Where are you going now? * Eleonore Stump talks about Thomas Aquinas's understanding of love in her paper, "Love, by All Accounts." Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 80, no. 2 (2006): 25-43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27645191. |
Paul"...life up your love to that cloud [of unknowing]...let God draw your love up to that cloud...through the help of his grace, to forget every other thing." Archives
January 2025
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