4th Sunday in
Ordinary Time
Cycle C
Jer 1:4-5, 17-19
1 Cor 12:31-13:30
Lk 4:21-30
Have you ever fallen in
love?
I’ve actually given a lot
of thought to this concept of being in love this past year. I have really
struggled with it. Have I ever truly been in love? When and how? And how do I
know? What did it feel like, who was it with? Have I ever truly loved? Have I
ever truly been loved? I have tried to look back over the most important
relationships in my life and then judged them according to the criteria St.
Paul lays out in today’s letter to the Corinthians. There are a lot of descriptions
there of what love is and isn’t. Can I truly say that I have loved and been
loved that way?
Love can seem so ethereal
sometimes. I mean, you can’t touch it or see it. We think we can feel it, but
it is so much more than a feeling, so much more than our romanticized concepts.
We set high expectations for love, much of it formed by what we see, read and
hear in movies, books, and music. We seem to be obsessed with love, especially
with being loved, but we so often miss the mark when it comes to understanding
or defining it, and I believe so many broken relationships and feelings of depression
and lack of meaning in our lives can be traced to our unreal expectations of
love. Can we ever live up to the true definition of love?
Jon Sweeney, in his book,
Cloister Talks, recounts a conversation he had with Fr. Luke, a Trappist monk,
around the question of love. Fr. Luke said, “There’s clearly enormous
potential, and a desperate market, for real love in the world. Love, real love,
is far more rare than violence. And real love is more personally dangerous than
violence.” He went on to say, “You suffer it, which means that becoming open so
as to truly love leads to a new depth of life, and that depth includes pain.
The happy-go-lucky-I-love-everyone sort of blather makes no sense really. To love
everyone can sometimes amount to truly loving no one. Jesus said that to love
is to make yourself personally vulnerable. Hospitality, for instance, does not
simply mean a bowl of soup and a place to sleep, but also an open heart. To care
for the stranger is to be open to him, to be willing to be wounded by him. “
I remember the moment my
first child was born. I don’t believe that I knew the meaning of love until then.
At that instant I was struck with such an overwhelming feeling of joy, wonder, fear
and responsibility, something I hadn’t even felt when I fell in love with my wife.
I had just met that little person, and I knew that I would literally die for him.
Not just to protect him, I knew I had a new purpose in my life to dedicate
everything I am to him. On that day in 1985 I knew for the first time what it
felt to have my heart broken, woundedly open. I wouldn’t trade that experience
for anything in the world…and I’ve only really duplicated it when I witnessed
by daughter and grandsons being born.
You know, Jesus feels the
same way about you and me. From the moment he first met you, the moment he
first conceived of you as a person, unique in all of history, he loved you that
fiercely. Just as I felt I was willing and able to actually die for those little
babies Jesus was willing and able to actually die for us.
Jesus says that there is
no greater sign of love than to lay down your life for your friends. Most of us
are never called to make the ultimate sacrifice of dying for someone else, but
we lay down our lives for those we love every day through our commitment to
them and their needs above our own.
This passage from 1 Corinthians
is the most requested for weddings. And it makes sense, because a wedding is
all about love, love, love, and the bride and groom are bathed in such strong
emotional feelings for each other, it must be love, right? But the reality is that in a married
relationship we fall in and out of love so many times. Sometimes we feel it so
strongly and other times we struggle to find it at all. And most times it is
just the soup that we swim in; it’s the framework of our existence.
We always know it’s there
but it’s sort of in the background most times, almost like our operating system
for living.
I actually printed out a
copy of that passage today, you know, love is patient, love is kind, etc. and
taped it to the wall next to my desk in my office, and for a while I would read
it out loud every morning before starting work, just to try to focus on it
throughout the day. And there are a lot of beautiful, unselfish sentiments
there. But there is also an undercurrent of suffering there. Being patient, not
brooding, not holding grudges, assumes that there are so many times that we
have to put up with people and situations that hurt us. And that part about
rejoicing with the truth so often requires us to have courage to stand up to
lies and insincerity and lack of love.
We see it in the reading
from Jeremiah today. Jeremiah is the prophet of lamentation, and he had a
really rough go of it. His calling as a prophet put him at odds with the entire
country. He was calling them to repentance and conversion, and they didn’t want
to hear that. His life was constantly in danger, but he had to testify to the
truth. He was called to love those who hated him and to actually lay down his
life for them. Yes, love is patient and love is kind, but love is also tough
and cold and hard sometimes. Telling the truth to people you love takes a lot
of courage.
I imagine it was really
hard for Jesus that day in Nazareth, too. He had just returned home after going
throughout the countryside preaching, healing and teaching. Word had reached
Nazareth of all the wonders he had been performing in other towns, and now he
had come into their synagogue with a prophetic message. The blind would see,
the deaf would hear, and the poor would have the good news proclaimed to them,
and all of this was being fulfilled in their hearing. They thought that was pretty
cool, until they realized who it was who was telling them this. Isn’t this just
Joseph’s son? Where does he come up with this stuff? And all they really wanted
to see were the miracles, anyway. Remember that these were his relatives and
friends, and they were probably very incredulous. Familiarity breeds contempt,
they say. And so, Jesus hits them hard with the truth. No prophet has honor in
his own place, with his own people. And that made them mad. What do you mean
you won’t perform miracles here for us, your people, who know you so well? We
know you’re nobody special, just the carpenter’s son. And so, as with all
prophets, they tried to kill him. That rejection must have hurt Jesus deeply. It
doesn’t say in scripture if he ever returned to Nazareth.
But he had to admonish
them because he loved them. We also are hurt deepest by those we love the most,
by those we think should love us the most. I have always found it curious that
the one thing St. Paul fails to say is that love forgives and love receives
forgiveness. A wise monk once told me that one of the most loving acts we can
do is to say we are sorry to someone, because when we ask for forgiveness we
are giving them the opportunity to love us. We love most when we give those we
love the opportunity to love us in return.
And the truest love is to
continue to love those who refuse to love us, to open our hearts to the
possibility of rejection. I used to think that true love had to be the love
that was reciprocated, now I believe it is continuing to love in the face of
rejection. Jeremiah still prophesized to those who sought to kill him, and
Jesus still died on the cross for his family and friends who rejected him,
belittled him, and tried to kill him also.
Faith, hope and love. It is
love that gives us faith and both love and faith give us hope. And I believe we
are desperate for hope, just as we are desperate for love. We need to know that
there is something else beyond ourselves, someone who will always be faithful
and true to us, even when we fail to be faithful and true to him. Someone who
will always have a heart open for us.
We image our creator in
so many ways, but mainly in our ability to love, because God is love. Take all
those attributes St. Paul gives the Corinthians and substitute the word God for
love. This is the kind of God we have.
God is patient, God is
kind.
God is not jealous, God
is not pompous,
God is not inflated, God
is not rude,
God does not seek his own
interests,
God is not
quick-tempered, God does not brood over injury,
God does not rejoice in
wrongdoing,
But rejoices in the
truth.
God bears all things,
believes all things,
Hopes all things, endures
all things.
God never fails
