The central theme of the New Testament is the offer of God's infinite love for us and the invitation to requite his love with our whole being. In his First Letter, St. John the Evangelist states that God is love. As I have discussed in prior reflections, love, by its very nature, requires a love dynamic. In God, there is the Father, who is the One Who Loves. His love is received and reciprocated by the Son, who is the Beloved. The love that exists between the Father and the Son is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Trinity is an eternal exchange of infinite love, which is not bound by time, but takes place in the eternal timeless now of God’s infinite nature.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus states: "As the Father loves me, so I also love you. Remain in my love." (John 15:9) Jesus tells us that his love for us is the same eternal, infinite love that exists within the Holy Trinity. We receive his love by requiting his love with our whole lives. But, we might ask, what does it look like to love Jesus? In the Gospel passage for today, Jesus tells us: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments." (John14:15) In another passage in the Gospel of John, he also states: "I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another." (John 13:34) The answer then is that we love Jesus most fully when we love each other as he has loved us, becoming conduits of his love for all.
But how does Christ love us? The passage from the Gospel of John where he tells us to love one another as he has loved us is in the context of the Last Supper narrative. He has just demonstrated servant leadership by washing the feet of his disciples, instructing them, and through them us, to do the same for each other. But the washing of the feet is just the beginning. On Good Friday, Jesus offers himself up upon the Cross, laying his life down for all of us. To love each other as he has loved us means to be willing to lay our lives down for one another. We must be ready to be crucified for one another. That is the true love of Christ. That is the love we are to show each other in order to be able to love Christ fully.
In the Gospel passage for this Sunday, Jesus also says: "And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot accept, because it neither sees nor knows him." (John 14:16-17) Later in the Last Supper discourse, Jesus adds: "The Advocate, the holy Spirit that the Father will send in my name - he will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you." (John 14:26)
The Church has always interpreted this passage to mean that, throughout history, the Holy Spirit guards the Church from falling into error. God's revelation started in the Old Testament era and it concluded with the end of the New Testament period. Since then, God has not given us any new revelation. At the same time, the Holy Spirit has guided the Magisterium, which is the teaching authority of the Catholic Church, to come to deeper and deeper insights into the faith that has already been revealed.
Thus, the Church never teaches anything truly new, but only a deeper understanding of something already taught before. For example, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, which holds that she was conceived without Original Sin, was authoritatively proclaimed only in the 19th century, but the concept of Mary's sinlessness is rooted in a doctrine established in the early Church - that the Virgin Mary is the Mother of God.
In light if the theory of evolution regarding the natural world, some have proposed the idea of the evolution of Catholic doctrine as well. Here we must be careful. Catholic doctrine can evolve or develop only in the sense described above, that we come to a deeper understanding of what is already established. A good analogy would be seeing a car from afar. At first, we can tell little more than the fact that it is a car. But as we get closer, we can tell the make and model. Eventually, we can describe the interior and even the special features the car might have. However, we will never get to a point where we discover that the car is really a helicopter or a submarine. Likewise, the development of the doctrine of the Church can never entail the contradiction of earlier established teachings. If something was wrong in the second century, it is still wrong today. If something was true in the past, it is still true today.
The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, also plays a key role in the sacramental life of the Church. In each of the sacraments, the Holy Spirit is poured out upon us in a profound, life-changing manner. We especially associate the outpouring of the Holy Spirit with the Sacrament of Confirmation. In the First Reading for this Sunday we see that in Samaria many had been baptized but had not yet received the special outpouring of the Holy Spirit that we now call Confirmation. The Sacrament of Confirmation is the completion of our baptismal transformation. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit in Confirmation enables us to live out our baptismal vocation, as long as we are grounded in the intimate union with Christ offered to us in the Eucharist.
A part of loving one another as Christ has loved us is to invite everyone into this deepest possible union with Christ. The Second Reading for this Sunday instructs us to do so always with love. If we act in a way that is not loving when we are calling others to Christ, we will most likely drive them away. I am sure we have all encountered Christians whose behavior was a counter-signal, something that would make most people flee. Instead, as we invite others into Christ's love, let us be examples of his love in the way we speak, in the way we act, in the way we live the whole of our lives.
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The readings for Sixth Sunday of Easter, Cycle A are:
Acts 8:5-8, 14-17
Psalm 66:1-3, 4-5, 6-7, 16, 20
1 Peter 3:15-18
John 14:15-21
The full text can be found at the USCCB website.
Photo Credit: Detail of the Facade of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome by Zoltan Abraham (c) 2012.