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.