5 January 2019 - where love and charity are found

Saint John Neumann

Today's Readings

(Audio)

We know that we have passed from death to life
because we love our brothers.

Do we love our brothers? Do we love them in deed and truth or is it just a matter of words or speech? Jesus came to empower us to love. If we are not living lives of love, expressed in real and concrete actions we are not to that extent allowing Jesus to live in our lives as he desires.

The way we came to know love
was that he laid down his life for us;
so we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.

Jesus is the model to follow. By his resurrection he fills us with the power that we need to love as he loves. In his death Jesus fully enters into our poverty precisely so that he can raise us to life. This is why John writes that loving the brothers means we have passed from death to life. This is no idle metaphor. The seed of life in us is something we would not have without the resurrection. Now that we do have it we need to nourish it and let it grow.

We may wonder if anything truly and unequivocally good can come from our hearts. We have to admit that all of us have at least partially selfish motives for even the good things we do. Even our acts of love tend to be half done for our own vanity and pride, or out of fear at failing at duty, or for any other number of reasons that don't sound like new resurrection life.

But Nathanael said to him,
"Can anything good come from Nazareth?" 
Philip said to him, "Come and see." 

We need to step beyond our perception of what is possible. When we come to and follow Jesus he gives us that hope that genuine love is possible. He does this first by giving us a new place to begin.

Nathanael said to him, "How do you know me?" 
Jesus answered and said to him,
"Before Philip called you, I saw you under the fig tree." 

Jesus knows and loves us before we know and love him.  Because the initiative is his we don't have to depend on ourselves, on Nazareth, or on any earthly reality in our to hope that our love might become genuine. We love because he first loved us. Jesus becomes for us the place where true love can be found and then lived and given.

And he said to him, "Amen, amen, I say to you, 
you will see the sky opened and the angels of God 
ascending and descending on the Son of Man."

Let us join Nathaniel in praising God who discovers in each of us sons and daughters who are capable of genuine love where we ourselves were in doubt or despair.

Let all the earth cry out to God with joy.