DAILY- HOMILY

May 6, 2018 - 6th SUNDAY OF EASTER

Cycle B. White.

Acts 10: 25-26, 34-35, 44-48 / 1 Jn 4: 7-10 / Jn 15: 9 -17

FROM THE 2ND READING:            1 Jn 4: 7- 10

My dear friends, let us love one another for love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Those who do not love have not known God, for God is love.

How did the love of God appear among us? God sent his only Son into this world that we might have life through him. This is love, not that we loved God but that he first loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

GOSPEL READING:           Jn 15: 9- 10, 12, 17

Jesus said to his disciples, "As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; remain in my love. You will remain in my love if you keep my commandments, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and remain in his love....

"This is my commandment: love one another as I have loved you. There is no greater love than this, to give one's life for one's friends; and you are my friends if you do what I command you....

"This is my command, that you love one another."

REFLECTION

The readings today summarize that Christian faith is about love of God and

of neighbor. The first letter of John is an exhortation that to love the neighbor is to love God. In the Gospel reading from the Last Supper discourse Jesus speaks of his Father's love for him and his love for his disciples and calls his disciples to love one another.

The Christian ethos is bound to this dual dimension of loving; the imperative to love one another is intrinsically linked to the more fundamental love of God. To the Christian, to love the other is never considered just a human initiative: rather it is a rightful response to the primordial experience of God's love for us.

Here lies the reason for the Christian's call to love others: because God has loved us first. Only with this foundational experience of being loved is the human being exhorted to give back by loving others in return.

In other words Christianity's call to love others is rooted firmly on this underlying principle that governs our very existence - that God loves us. Only when this is understood is one able to respond to love others without feeling burdened, obliged or weighed down.

The Swiss writer Urs Von Balthasar wrote that the key to being continually attuned to this fundamental love of God is to be "confronted with the sheer grace and beauty of life." This entails having a heightened sense of awe at one's existence, of a profound recognition that one's life is not merited but is owed to Someone greater, to Someone whose very essence is sheer goodness. This keen awareness is vital as it shatters the illusion of man's primacy in the world, paving the way to a humble recognition that God is and will always be the center, the locus as it were, of existence. This powerful conviction, spoken by poets, prophets and philosophers alike, is what safeguards a human being's puny hands from clinging dearly to the world's riches as if they were his to possess. Acknowledging the primacy of God moderates the all too human predilection to find security in material possessions, tempering inclination to greed and self-love and helping the human heart to set its sights aright not on the gifts but on the generous Giver.

To be constantly "confronted with the sheer grace and beauty of life," Von Balthasar cites our human experience from birth: to see the immeasurable goodness of parents, especially mothers, to their children. Growing in such life­ giving environments, children learn to respond with love, to care with love..

Similarly, this kind of response is what Jesus desires when he gives the commandment to love one another. Because one has been overwhelmed by such unconditional love of God, the expected reaction is to love as well. And this is the natural way of things.

WE PRAY FOR MTQ DAILY PRAYER INTENTIONS:

BIRTHDAY

     Michael P. Catindig

     Rode! Manalo

     Ginaflor Oris

     Shirley Tan

Finally, we pray for one another, for those who have asked our prayers and for those who need our prayers the most. 

Have a good day!

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