Jesus said “This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” . At first, this seems easy and heartwarming. I’m sure you have heard many flowery (or saccharine) homilies on love. However, love can be very complicated and is worth exploring. For example, do you love your husband the same as the day you met him, or has that love changed and grown over time? Do you love your husband in the same way as your son, or do you express that love in different ways? Do you love your dog in the same way as you love God? Can you love something at one point and time, and hate it another? Does love require action? Or can it simply be passive and from afar? Love, as a word, can be so all-encompassing, that the Greeks had many words for love, for separate meanings, and the Greek New Testament uses multiple words for love. However, in English, they all get translated as the same word. 

To offer a short and sweet reflection on love, which is written to only warm the reader, would be doing an injustice to the words of Christ. Yes, Jesus said that He will know you by your love, but he also taught the disciples that “whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”. For context, that is as if you heard Father Dan in his Sunday homily say “whoever wishes to follow me must deny herself, sit down in the electric chair, and follow me.” Love, in its truest sense can be very costly, harsh, and dreadful. For, near the apex of Christ’s most powerful sermon He told his followers to “Love your enemies”. Imagine the person you have the most ill-feeling for at the moment. Perhaps it is Putin, Trump , or Biden. Perhaps it is a player on the Cowboys or Mets. Maybe it is a lousy neighbor or a terrorist. Whoever it may be, that is who Christ requires you to love in order to be called His disciple. Yes, this is difficult to do, but is it harder than being nailed to a cross? 

However, as painful and harsh love can be sometimes, it is ultimately the greatest gift from God, for “God is Love”. God loves you because God knows you better than you know yourself. God loves you because God chooses to be much closer to you then you can possibly imagine. God gifted the incarnation to us out of love. 

Through prayer we are reminded of God’s love. Through prayer we can find the strength to pick up our cross daily and actively love our sisters and brothers in Christ. 

“Where there is no love, put love and you will take out love.” – St. John of the Cross

“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will discover fire.” -Teilhard De Chardin

Agape    Αγαπη