
Today Jesus
reveals to us the heart of the New Covenant in his blood: "I give you a new
commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so also should you love one
another." This passage of John’s Gospel, brief as it is, packs a whole new
world of meaning, transformation, and hope. It offers us the legacy—which is
both a gift and a task—that Jesus leaves to his disciples. Agápe is
Jesus’ legacy to us: loving as God loves. The Lord is communicating what
he considers indispensable for his disciples in the future. As is always the
case when the end of life approaches, he is disposing of his inheritance. The
act of transmitting something precious has to do with death and fills the moment
with solemnity. But Jesus is not simply handing over an inert something, like
money or property. He is bequeathing to us the form of his life, a
life characterized by the kind of love that is the most powerful antidote
against death.
Expressed
in the form of a command (Love one another!), the love that Jesus asks his
disciples to practice has a Paschal form in the sense that it calls for us, his
disciples, to exit from ourselves in order to receive in ourselves the
form of Christ, and, as Cyril of Alexandria says, “the form and figure of
Christ in us is love”. To live love as Jesus lived it is to participate in the
energies of the Risen One, to pass from death to life. It is to profess our
Easter faith in our every daily encounter. The love lived by Jesus is the
innermost power of his Resurrection. Therefore, Jesus points the disciples to
the way of love as the way to make the Resurrection a constant practice. To
love unconditionally and without hesitation is the infallible way to live the
radical newness of Christianity. The way of concrete love is the existential
proclamation in daily life that death does not have the last word.
Behold, I
make all things new: the meaning of this affirmation by the One who sits
upon the throne of glory is revealed in Jesus’ Resurrection. The Resurrection
is the vantage point from which to look at everything in a radically new way.
Since Jesus’ Resurrection, nothing in the lives of humans and in history has
changed from how things were before. Historical tragedies and personal dramas
have not ended, and humans stubbornly show their persistence in the errors,
vices, and follies of all previous times. But the Resurrection allows us to look
at all reality from a fresh point of view, and to seize whatever happens as an
opportunity to do something truly new within ourselves and in the world around
us. The Resurrection does not so much teach us to expect new and different
things to occur outside ourselves: that would be to exempt us from all
responsibility. Rather, the Resurrection instills in us the responsibility to
live the often painful and distressing realities of everyday life in a new way.
It leads us to look in a new and different way at the same old narratives and
the same old human existences.
You may
have missed the very beginning of our text, which provides the essential
context for understanding Jesus’ New Commandment in all its radical newness.
Our passage begins with the words When Judas had left them… Jesus is
celebrating the Last Supper with the apostles, and the verse before this one
says: After receiving the piece of bread, Judas immediately went out. And
it was night. And then: When Judas had left them, Jesus said… It
is the point of view of the Resurrection, that is, of the concrete practice of
love, that enables Jesus to look at Judas’ betrayal as an opportunity for
loving, as a chance Jesus is given to practice love. Jesus does not make Judas
better, does not change him, does not convert him. He does not even try to
bring Judas back into the fold with words of persuasion, exhortation, threats
of exclusion. Instead, Jesus welcomes what is concretely happening before him
and turns it into an opportunity to live out love and concretely manifest God’s
love. For Jesus, Judas’ betrayal is an opportunity to love even those who make
themselves his enemies. In this way, he is proclaiming by his deeds and attitude
that God’s love is for everyone, not just for some. God’s love is not only for
the lovable but also for the unlovable, those who don’t deserve love because
they have forfeited it through betrayal and infidelity.
This
gospel closely relates Judas’ exit from the heart of the community to Jesus’
glorification. Immediately after Judas leaves, Jesus strangely exclaims: "Now
is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him." The act of
betrayal could have been denounced and blamed, judged, and condemned. It could
have been used as grounds for Judas’ formal expulsion from the apostolic
community. Instead, Jesus chooses to see it as an element within the Son’s
relationship with the Father and thus as a sign of the Son’s and the Father’s
glorification. Jesus refers everything back to the Father’s plan of redemption
and never allows private feelings to stand in the way of such clarity of
purpose. It is through the Father’s eyes that Jesus sees even his own betrayal
and death, something impossible in purely human terms. The question that
emerges from this and challenges our reactions, our ways of reasoning and
behaving, even as faithful, church-going Christians, is this: What use do
we make of situations of conflict or injustice? How do we react to the
difficulties a person poses to us through unjust and hurtful behavior? Often
our first reaction is self-defense, which is more than legitimate and probably
even required on many occasions if not always. However, here Jesus shows us a
different behavior.
To
understand Jesus’ attitude, we must change the point of view from which we view
reality and others. Judas’ gesture of betrayal is an opportunity for Jesus to
ask himself how he can continue to love Judas even in that situation. Jesus is
glorified by the way he decides (yes, decides!) to love Judas to the end.
And if Jesus’ elevation on the cross is the sign of his glorification by the
Father, and the cross is the place where Jesus reveals God most fully, then
this glorification takes place already now, in the decision by which
Jesus chooses not to oppose Judas’ wickedness. Jesus is showing us,
his own disciples, that absolutely everything can be lived as the
Gospel teaches, that is, under the sign of love—even the evil that people do.
It is
clear, therefore, that the hour of Jesus’ glorification is not ushered in by
Judas by his act of betrayal, but by the love of Jesus who loved his own
to the end. Jesus forgives, that is, he continues to love faithfully those
who stop loving him, those who betray him, those who lie to him. And so he
demonstrates through his own manner of existing in the world that love is
stronger than death, that to love is the logical practice of the Risen Life, and
this paradoxically at the very moment when his unconditional loving will lead
him to his death. Jesus’ words, "Now is the Son of Man glorified," sound
like a cry of victory, and the victory consists in the glorious fact that evil
has not stifled loving. Disappointment and bitterness at his friend’s betrayal
did not prevent Jesus from unilaterally persevering in loving.
This
victory of Jesus over the evil of others, without this evil tainting him or
drawing him into the coils of its perverse logic: this is Resurrection! At this
moment Jesus is about to leave his friends. He has a lucid awareness of the
bleak future immediately before him and his followers. In order not to forsake
his own, Jesus leaves them a legacy: it consists of the suggestion, the warning, and the commandment that love is the only way to practice Resurrection. By
engaging in active agápe as their ordinary way of life, Jesus’
disciples will show that they, as his true Body, are the living extension of
Jesus’ redeeming presence in the world throughout history.
As
towering examples of this truth let us remember in conclusion three of the ten
persons who were declared saints in Rome just this morning by the Holy
Father: our own, St Charles de Foucauld, of aristocratic origin, former monk
of Neiges, who chose to spend his life in utter simplicity and poverty among
the Tuareg of the Sahara Desert and was murdered for it; St Titus
Brandsma, a Dutch Carmelite friar who refused to carry out Nazi ordinances and
perished at Dachau for it; and St Lazarus Devasahayam, an 18th-century
Indian layman who not only had the boldness to convert to Christianity but then
proceeded to denounce the Hindu caste system as unworthy of human beings, and
was executed for it. This is what the Paschal Mystery of Christ looks like when
it is lived out in the concrete circumstances of this world with all its
injustice and prejudice. This is what it means to practice the
Resurrection in our lives: to love unto the end as Jesus
did. No wonder Paul and Barnabas had to “strengthen the spirits of
the disciples [at Antioch], and exhorted them to persevere in the faith,
saying: ‘It is necessary for us to undergo many hardships
to enter the kingdom of God’”. Saints Charles, Titus, and Lazarus: pray for us!
Today's homily by Father Simeon.