Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter (B), Vigil

May 8, 2021

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.8.21_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into what I think may be perhaps the most consequential conversation of all time, in the Risen Lord Jesus’ words to the apostles that constitute our Gospel passage this Sunday.

* Jesus tells us, “Just as the Father loves me, so I love you.” We know that God the Father cannot possibly love God the Son more perfectly, or deeply, or better than he does. And Jesus is saying that he loves us just as much, just as profoundly, just as completely as God the Father loves him. This is the true foundation of the Christian life, to live in the love of God. God the Father so loved us that he gave his only Son so that we might not perish but have eternal life. God the Son loved us by freely and lovingly giving that life in order to save ours. God the Holy Spirit is that love between the Father and the Son and hence, since Jesus loves us like the Father loves him, the Holy Spirit is, by application, mysteriously the love between Jesus and us. Since God is love, he wishes to bring us into that communion of love, and that’s what Jesus’ and the Holy Spirit’s missions seek to achieve.

* We all know how being loved can turn someone’s life right side up. I remember when I was a high school chaplain. Boys who used to come to high school with their shirts sloppy, their ties crooked, their hair a Mess, would all of a sudden come in with shirts and pants pressed, the double-windsor knot perfect, with every hair shampooed and coiffed in place. When I would note the positive change that had taken place within them and ask, “What’s her name?,” they would think I was a soul-reading genius. But what was going on was crystal clear. They had fallen in love and that love gave meaning to everything they did, including how they prepared for school. If this is what can happen with a teenage crush, imagine what is supposed to happen when God loves us permanently? If the words “I love you” can make a dramatic difference in someone’s existence, what about Jesus’ saying, “I love you just as the Father loves me?”

* In one of the most famous passages of his pontificate, Saint John Paul II stated, “Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.” If this is true about the human love we find in the family, in friendships, and in romantic relationships especially marriage, how much more is it true about the love of God? There’s a reason for this: we’re made in the image and likeness of God who is love, who exists in a loving communion of persons. If we don’t live in love, if we don’t dwell in a loving communion of persons, then we’re lost before God, before others, and within ourselves. That’s why Jesus says to us, emphatically, that he loves us, and that he loves us as purely and perfectly as the Father loves him.

* But the consequential conversation with Jesus doesn’t stop there. He tells us, “Remain in my love.” He knows that many of us run away from love in general and his love in particular. Burning love from someone else can make us feel uncomfortable because we don’t think we’re worthy of it, because we perhaps know that the only response to love is to love back and we fear we’re not ...