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Article_Christian love is 'an act of the will'

Homilies | Saturday, October 25, 2014

Christian love is 'an act of the will'

Archbishop Wenski's homily at Mass with Florida's Catholic women

Archbishop Thomas Wenski preached this homily during a Mass with members of the Florida Council of Catholic Women, who gathered Oct. 23-26 in Fort Lauderdale for their biennial conference. The Mass was celebrated Oct. 25 at Assumption Church in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea. 

Today’s Gospel reading today says it all: Love God, love your neighbor. That’s the sum of the Law and the Prophets. In fact, you could take all the Scriptures from Genesis to the Book of Revelation and summarize their teachings in one word: Love.

St. Augustine once said: Love and do as you wish. Now, of course, St. Augustine, when he said this, he understood that his audience knew that he was speaking of that Christian, self-sacrificial love that the Greeks called “agape.” If you love with the love of “agape” you will wish what is right, what is just, what is consonant with God’s will.

Of course today the word love is used and misused. Today, it can mean just about anything—and when something means anything it usually means nothing. For some, love is a mere feeling, a sentiment: something sweet and syrupy—like a Hallmark card. Others use the word almost exclusively to translate what the Greeks called “eros.” And so for them, love is related to physical pleasure and the satisfaction of one’s desires. And so, I would wage that if we sent five people out to do a series of “man in the street” interviews and each of these five people asked five other people what love is we would get back 25 different answers. Each interviewee would give his or her own private definition of what love is.

Of course, we don’t have to do that. We don’t look to opinion polls to find out what we think about love. We are Christians—and so we look to Jesus who tells us to love God—and to love each other as he himself has loved us. St. Augustine was right; if we love as Jesus loved then we can do as we wish—for if we love like Jesus we will do what is right, what is just, what is to the advantage of the other.And pay attention to the verbs here. If we love as Jesus loved, we will do what is right. The verb here is “do.” For Jesus, and therefore for us, love is more than just a feeling: It is an action, it is a commitment, it is a decision. In other words, it is an act of the will. And we can will to do what is right, what is just—even when we don’t feel like it. For example, a mother shows her love for her baby child not just through her warm feelings for that child. Love is getting up at 2 a.m. for that feeding. And whether you feel like getting up or not is irrelevant. It is the getting up—it’s the “doing” that counts; not the feelings.

And this is how Jesus loved. Jesus so loved God the Father and therefore did the Father’s will. He decided to go up to Mount Calvary—remember, how important it is for us to remember that Jesus willingly died for us in obedience to his Father’s will. Of course, if you love someone you want to embrace the beloved. And didn’t Jesus open his arms on the cross in a wide embrace—an embrace that encompasses each one of us. Love for Jesus is commitment; love for Jesus is a decision; love for Jesus is sacrifice—a free gift offered to the one he loved—with his whole heart, his whole strength; a free gift offered for those whom he loved as himself. From the cross, we also learn that love means to forgive—to forgive as Jesus forgave: Father, they do not know what they do.

And the center of our Catholic faith is love. We will be judged on the last day on how we loved: Did we welcome the stranger, did we feed the hungry, did we clothe the naked? In that famous parable, the judge won’t ask us about how we felt about these things; he’ll ask us about what we did.

Our Catholic faith is not a feel good religion—and no religion that has the cross at its heart is going to be a “feel good” religion. Our religion is ultimately a “do good” religion—and we’ve got to do good even when we don’t feel like it.

Doing good, doing what is right, what is just, is what St. Paul would call “living the truth in love.” The “good” we must do is more than just what I think or I feel is good. The good we must do—and the evil we must avoid—is spelled out for us in the Scriptures and in the moral teachings of the Church. We don’t get to make up our “truths” —we are creatures made in the image and likeness of God and thus we are to conform ourselves to the truth as established by God. Part of loving God is seeking to do his will in all things. Living the truth in love means not just talking the talk but walking the walk. Truth and love are both necessary; for divorced from truth—the truth about who we are, the truth about marriage and the family, the truth about our responsibilities in the world—divorced from truth, love becomes just sentimentality. Again, our Catholic faith is not some “feel good” religion; it is a “do good” religion.

This I think was what the bishops and pope said last week at the conclusion of the Extraordinary Synod on the Family, a meeting that will be followed up with a more intensive Synod on the Family next year. In the discussions during the Synod—especially as reported by the secular media—it seemed to some that some bishops were saying that the “problem” was the Gospel. And there are those inside and outside the Church who might have hoped that the Church would change one or other of the “hard sayings” of the Gospel.

But as Pope Francis said, we have to resist the temptations to go to one extreme or another—being so rigid as to shut out the Holy Spirit, or being so lax that we apply a “deceptive mercy” that covers up wounds without first curing and treating them. Today our society has a hard time distinguishing good from evil. And so, how would watering down the truth help that situation?

But the bishops and the pope—after some days of intense discussion—affirmed that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is not the problem; it is the solution. The love of Jesus and the truth of his Gospel is the solution for our families, for every one of us, as we deal with the messiness of our lives and lives of our loved ones.

The Gospel—living the truth in love—restores hope and spreads joy. And this is the challenge before us today—to witness to the joy of the Gospel. May we love God and our neighbor as Jesus did: In word and in deed. 

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