Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 13:1 - 23

We’ve just heard one of the two parables where Jesus tells his disciples what the parable means. Most of the time we don’t have a record of whether he explained a parable or not. And I wonder if there’s a reason for that. Now I’ve been fortunate in knowing some very holy people, and I think a sign of holiness is a real sense of humor. Jesus’ life story, as much as we know of it, was recorded by four people who probably were connected to the apostles in some way, but they themselves were probably not the apostles. After all, Matthew, Mark and John do not have an author’s name attached to them, and we think Luke, not an apostle, by the way, wrote Luke and Acts because there is a place in the Acts of the Apostles where Luke joins Paul on his missionary endeavors and begins to write in the first person instead of the third. And since the writers of the gospels were writing theology and believed Jesus was divine as well as human, they did not emphasize his humor. But you can see hints of it. He nicknames Peter “the Rock” and that’s kind of irony because Peter will deny Jesus after insisting that he won’t. He calls James and John “sons of thunder” when they ask whether they should call down fire on a Samaritan village. A great moment is when Jesus brings the little girl back from the dead and when the parents are standing there with their mouths hanging open, he turns to them and says, “give her something to eat!”. And you can find many more hints if you are listening carefully, because holy people have light hearts and a sense of humor -- just read an honest biography of a modern saint.

So with the parable we just heard, and with Jesus’ explanation of what it means, I am not going to try to explain the parable, or the explanation. But I think we can look at this parable as another example of Jesus’ sense of humor. And it may open things up a bit for us.

If you were a first century Palestinian farmer you would be very careful of your seed. You would keep it dry and bug - free until it was time to sew your crop. Before you threw any seed down you would till the soil, and if you could, you would wait until a little rain had fallen. If you lived near a stream, you might haul some buckets of water up and pour them over your small plot. And then having made the ground as welcoming as you could, you would carefully put the seed in the best ground. After that you would be guarding it from animals that ate seeds and the shoots of the plants that you were counting on to provide you with your livelihood -- and seed for the next year. It was a big deal to put down seed, and a real farmer would never dance around tossing handfuls of seed onto rocky ground, into thorn bushes, onto a road. So the picture Jesus paints must have seemed very strange to the apostles. And Jesus goes on to point out the obvious; the seed that fell on the road, the thorn bushes, and the rocky ground didn’t do so well; only that which fell on good soil.

Maybe the apostles have missed the main point. aFter all if the sewer is God, it’s like Jesus says in many other places, God is extravagant; he is always pouring out his blessings on the deserving and undeserving; He makes not distinction about whether you are a sinner or a saint, he’s raining grace upon you, even if he knows you are going to reject it, even if he knows that you would rather spend eternity alone rather than at his extravagant banquet.

So the apostles ask, “Explain this parable!” And Jesus goes on to explain it -- with an explanation that a four year old could understand, and I know because I can remember when I was four years old. And the explanation does nothing except show you and I how we can distance ourselves from the main message. Jesus never forces us, always gives us a way to depersonalize his message to us. Because I can nod with the apostles and agree that there are people who just don’t get what Jesus is talking about, and then there is me, who will bear good fruit someday. Maybe. When I get time. After I get through this next crisis in my life.

Maybe the parable means that if God is extravagant and limitless, and I am created in his image and likeness, and if Jesus tells me that I can only save my life if I lose it, and if he says that the measure with which I measure out will be the measure used to reward me, I better imitate God; imitate Jesus, who gave everything; imitate the saints, who gave all that they could; imitate holy married couples who bring new souls into the world and live to pass on their faith to their children; imitate holy priests who get up in the middle of the night to bring the sacrament to someone who is dying. Because that’s the point.

So listen once again to Jesus, who over and over again tells us that we will only find true happiness if we give ourselves away, if we empty ourselves out, if we sell everything so that we can have the pearl of great price. And the wonderful thing is, Jesus promises to make up for our lack of generosity -- he will give himself away. But you and I have to at least have some skin in the game.

Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 11:25 - 30

When I went into my specialty training, my boss was a recognized leader in the field of cancer medicine, which at that time was just beginning to be a thing. He had published numerous papers, was co-author of the bible of Medical Oncology, and had developed the first successful treatment for acute leukemia. He always had something interesting to say, whether it was about medicine or politics or whatever else we were talking about. I think you could say he was a genius. He was wise and learned.

There is nothing wrong with being wise and learned. God gave us brains and the capacity to explore the universe, and I think he expects us to do so. So why does Jesus praise the Father for hiding things from the wise and learned and revealing them to little children?

I’ve known a lot of people who are wise and learned. Unfortunately, they are like the rest of us; some are pretty stuck-up, as we used to say; they think they know everything. When you think you know everything, you cease being able to learn anything new. But people like that also tend to think they don’t need other people. I don’t mean that they think they don’t need other people to get along in the world -- they need medical care, they need policemen, they need grocery store workers -- but they need other people in the sense that they fulfill needs, not in the sense that they are equals, who deserve respect because they are children of God; not because they recognize that without true friends life isn’t what it could be. Being wise and learned for them has covered over the child that is in all of us.

I think Jesus is telling us that we won’t learn the secrets of life, we won’t appreciate the truths of his revelation, until we allow that child to flourish. There are a lot of things about little children that are not particularly inviting; they are smelly and messy and noisy and demand a lot of attention. They also ask some pretty strange questions. My son used to ask me over and over again which animal would win if a tyrannosaurus fought with a shark. I would tell him how improbable that would be, but it didn’t help. If I said I didn’t know, he would persist until finally I would choose a side. Then he would argue against my position. This type of inquiry went on a lot. But there are wonderful things about children that we all can see and perhaps long for in ourselves.

They trust. They have no doubt that they will be fed and sheltered and clothed and cared for. They know that they are loved unconditionally, and it’s ok to let out your frustrations on Mom or Dad, they won’t stop loving you. We adults lose this wonderful trust -- perhaps because we have been betrayed too often, but mostly because we have become wise and learned, and depend on our own strength to see us through.

Children live in the present. If you’ve ever gone on a walk with a three year old, you know how their attention is on the present moment -- they see a dog, they want to pet him; they see a flower, they want to smell it. It’s a wonderful thing to live in the present. But we wise and learned forget this; we live with a foot in the past, where we remember moments of pain or pleasure; and a foot in the future where we think about where we are going and what we will have when we arrive there.

Children also forgive. I have seen so often two kids having a terrible fight and a half-hour later they are playing happily together. And I have been forgiven many times by my own children for things I said in anger or for not giving them the attention they needed at a particular moment, or choosing work over playing with them. And we wise and learned often fail to forgive, at least with the degree that a child forgives.

And why is all this important? I think Jesus gives us a hint in this gospel today. He says, “come to me all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” He says, “take my yoke upon you … and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light”. Jesus is saying something that’s very hard for the wise and learned to grasp -- true happiness, real joy, depends on surrendering everything to Jesus, to trust him completely, to quit trying to carry our burdens alone, and take him up on his offer to help us bear our burdens, to yoke ourselves to him. And we who are wise and learned have a hard time in really trusting Jesus, in really living in the present, which is the only place we can find God; and really forgiving, which frees us up to see our neighbor through Jesus’ eyes, Jesus who told us that we are to forgive seventy times seven; Jesus who told the story of the father who shows us what true forgiveness is really like.

So is it wrong to be wise and learned? Not at all. What is wrong is to lose the child in us. And that brings us back to my boss in my fellowship; he never did. He died a few years ago. The last time I saw him he was in his early nineties, and had undergone surgery for an aneurism. He had to take antibiotics and was hooked up to an intravenous pump. After my introduction he gave a brilliant lecture about his current field of research, and you could see that he had never lost his childlike fascination with the world of medicine; and when you compared notes afterward and reminisced about the good old days, you might have noted that he only spoke good things about the people in his life, even those who had hurt him. And Jesus is telling us that little children have no problem reaching out their hands to someone that can help them, and that’s what he wants from us -- just a hand that he can take to hold us up and help us get where he wants us to go.

Corpus Christi 2020

John 6:51 - 59

There are many pleasures in life -- a day at the beach, a game of golf with friends, an evening in front of the fireplace on a cold winter’s day, and of course being with the person you pledged to spend your life with -- we can all think of our favorite things. But except for a few psychologically disturbed individuals, a pleasure that is common to every human being is the act eating. Some people make a big thing about it, spending hours in the kitchen and then having a long drawn out supper savoring the food and wine. Some people on the other hand, are mostly interested in eating something to turn off the hunger pangs. But in either extreme, there is pleasure. The pleasure of eating can still be seen in people who have dementia.

We know why God associates pleasure with human activities; it’s because he wants to have us pursue those actions. And the pleasure of eating and drinking are directly connected to the quality of our lives. You and I Long for those moments in life when we can lean back and say, “It doesn’t get any better than this!” Without exception, we say that when we feel that we are physically and emotionally fulfilled.

Today we hear one of the most controversial passages in the New Testament, Jesus not only tells us that we are to eat his flesh and drink his blood, but if we don’t we can’t have eternal life. And this is from the Gospel of John; the other three Gospels describe the last supper when Jesus held up bread and said that it was his body and they were to eat it, and the wine in the cup was his blood and they were to drink it. Very early in Christianity many fathers of the Church took Jesus at his word, and the doctrine of the real presence began to develop. Roman Catholics along with Eastern Orthodox Christians pretty much stick to that same idea -- the real presence of Jesus in what appears to be bread and wine. Most protestant denominations don’t go that far, but still see something special in their celebrations of the Eucharist. Many Christians don’t believe the bread and wine become the body and blood of Jesus Christ, but many Catholics don’t either, if you believe the polls. And many Catholics who claim to believe this don’t act as if they do. I think most of us could get behind the idea that Jesus is really present in the Eucharist, but why does he insist that we eat his flesh (or as the Greek text says, “Gnaw on his flesh”) and drink his blood? Some of our Protestant brothers say that what Jesus means is that we are to become one with him, and consuming the sacrament, which for them is only a symbol, is a way of acting out our intention to do so. I think we could agree with that. But I think the real significance of eating His flesh and drinking his blood, and we do both whenever we partake of the Eucharist, even if what we eat appears to be bread, or if what we drink appears to be wine) is that Jesus wants us to remember that He is interested in all of us, not just our souls. His flesh and blood become our flesh and blood, or as Saint Augustine put it, in the case of the Eucharist we become what we eat. And ultimately the miracle of the Eucharist is not beyond the powers of the one through whom all things were made.

If you look at any human being, rich, poor, sick, healthy, male, female, and I could go on, you find that we all have a spiritual hunger. Spiritual goes beyond our souls, and maybe we need a new word. But the point is, as the Buddha recognized 600 years before Christ, human beings are hurting because we are all bundles of desire that never gets totally satisfied. We desire material things, we desire comfort, we desire our youth when we are old a frail; we desire love when we are lonely -- and most of the rest of our time as well. We want more respect than we get; and even if we get exactly what we think we want, before the dust settles we want something else. We seek power, profit, pleasure and prestige, and it seems as though we can never get enough. And that makes us miserable. The Buddha's solution was to rid yourself of all desire, even the desire to continue to exist, and when you reached that state, you would dissolve into nothingness and finally escape from the pain of existing. But if you died with even a little desire left, you would soon be back existing, maybe as a bug or a king, it didn't matter; you would go through the same process over and over again, possibly forever.. The Buddha admitted that very few people could hope to achieve this and initially he did not think women could free themselves from desire at all -- they would have to wait until they reincarnated as a man.

I think the Eucharist is Jesus’ answer to that human dilemma. If he gives us himself to become part of our bodies, souls and minds, to literally become part of us, he is offering us participation in God himself and all desires are filled. And that is not dissolving into nothingness, that is eternal life. You may not feel anything when you partake of the Eucharist, but put your faith in the promise of Jesus: you have eaten his flesh and drunk his blood, and you have eternal life.

Trinity Sunday 2020

John 3:16 - 18
Today we celebrate the Trinity.  It’s a teaching common to most Christian bodies.  The Council of Constantinople codified the belief near the end of the fourth century, although we see evidence that eve at the end of the first century christian authors were writing about it.  And formulas like that of Paul, “The Grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of the father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you” suggest that New Testament writers had some idea of the Trinity.  And yet we Christians insist that God is One.  And every time Trinity Sunday rolls around preachers have a choice to make:  Shall I try to explain the Trinity once again?  Or should I ignore the whole thing and hope no one notices?  And what’s the big deal anyway?  After all, I can go all week long without thinking of the Trinity. 
But we should think about the Trinity.  After all, human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, and our faith tells us that God is somehow three persons in one God.  Thomas Aquinas made a wonderful argument about how if God is infinite, all powerful, all wise, all loving, etc, God has to be a Trinity.  But not everybody wants to hear about speculative theology on Trinity Sunday.  Richard Rohr, the Franciscan author and mystic, suggested we contemplate the Trinity by starting with the Three and seeing how they are One.  If we do that, we get an insight into how we humans should look.
We will see that God is dynamic. Saint Hilary invented the idea of perichoresis -- that the Trinity is kind of like a dance, where the three persons move in and out and around each other, but always moving.  Nothing contains God, certainly not our minds.  And God is fluid, constantly spilling over, constantly sweeping everything into himself.  Why does this matter?  Because we humans have a tendency to be rigid, to become fixed in our ways, to limit our thinking.  And the more we do this, the further we are from that God-image.
We will see that God is diverse; if God is three persons, each person in his own way embodies those attributes of God, truth, beauty, goodness, one-ness.  When we witness the racial tension in our society, it is because we fear what is different.  That’s not my fault or yours; it’s evolution; it took millions of years to get that way.  But if God can comfortably be diverse and one at the same time, that is how we humans should look as well.
We see that God is a commune.  The persons of the Trinity never act alone.  Another old theological idea is summed up in the latin word circumincession -- that means that each person contains the other two.  Jesus said “I am in the Father and the Father is in me”.  When Jesus is baptized, the Father speaks from the heavens and the Spirit descends like a dove.  When Jesus promised he would be with us to the end of the world he also sent the Holy Spirit.  Why is this important?  Because we humans like to go it alone, if we can do something without help, we do.  And yet we know deep in our hearts how much better things can be when we work together.  Even though the second person of the Trinity uniquely becomes human, suffers, dies, and rises again, the Father and the Spirit are part of this mystery as well. 
We see that God is hospitable.  In the beginning God created humans and probably everything else because being alone is not God-like.  And he fed the Israelitese in the desert; and Jesus clearly enjoyed company; and the Holy Spirit is all about gathering in the nations through the Church Jesus established.  Hospitality is an attribute of God and we should reflect that.
Finally, we see that God is self-sacrificing love.  Theologians talk about the Father begetting the Son -- The Father pours himself out holding back nothing in that begetting.  The Son, the begotten one, pours himself out in turn; in response to the Father’s love.  Saint John says everything was created through him.  And of course we see that self-emptying love displayed most graphically in the crucifixion.  And the Father and Son breathe forth the Holy Spirit, again, holding nothing back, emptying themselves out.  And the Spirit is emptying himself out in the form of gifts given to his church and indeed to all mankind.  And we are to look like that, we are to embody self-sacrificing love. 
The Gospel passage we hear today may be the most famous one; even if you never open a bible you probably know about John 3:16.  And we confront that troublesome word, “believe”.  For us it means that we agree with some statement of fact; but in the original languages, in biblical Hebrew and first century Greek, it meant much more.  It had overtones of complete trust, of acting on the word of someone else, of allowing someone else to take over your thinking.  And when we believe in the Son the result should be that the image and likeness of God in you and I should be more apparent to everyone.  And God is Trinity, God is dynamic, diverse, communal, hospitable, and self sacrificing love. 

Pentecost 2020

Pentecost 2020

Maybe we are at the turning point in this long disruption of our lives. When it all started there was every expectation that things would get back to normal in about two weeks. But as the news got more and more frightening, as it seemed that we were all helpless in the face of the virus, our whole lives changed. We all learned new ways of living, and how important the internet is to our quarantined lives. Tens of thousands of children and parents got a taste of home schooling; oddly enough, a poll taken suggested that about 40 percent had a more favorable impression than before. We learned that there are a lot of jobs that can be done from home with a good computer and internet connection. We missed being able to go out to a restaurant or a movie or travel. We’ve all become little islands,

Our society is broken, stripped of everything but the essentials. We’ve learned that our scientists and politicians are all too human. The stresses in our political establishment were made worse, to the point of irreconcilable differences. It looks like we will have another election where each of us has to decide which candidate is the lesser of two evils -- on second thought, that’s always the bottom line, I guess. And now after several months and intense investigation, we are learning that this highly contagious virus is not the villain it started out to be; in fact, the latest information suggests that the death rate is probably in the ballpark of that of the swine flu of a few years ago; thirty percent of people who are infected have no symptoms; and almost all the most serious cases are among the elderly and those with chronic illnesses. Grocery stores employ people to wipe down shopping carts -- but the latest information suggests that this probably isn’t a very likely way to transmit the disease. We wear masks, but if you are coughing and sneezing because you are full of viruses, you probably can’t breathe in the mask and would stay home anyway. So all in all, we’ve made a mountain out of a molehill.

Did the Holy Spirit do all this? Well, you can say yes and no. Anything that happens is obviously permitted by God. At the same time, from a materialist point of view, we know how viruses work, we know where this one came from, we know how it spreads, how it sickens and kills. But if we look at the past, it’s obvious that God has used catastrophes to teach us something. So I wonder. The Holy Spirit is, after all, a power that disrupts lives. As you read the Old Testament, when the Spirit of the Lord moved somebody, the result was life-changing. And when the Spirit overshadowed a young woman two thousand years ago, her entire life and all of history was shaken up. And as we’ve heard today, when the Spirit came upon those early followers of Jesus, they became convincing preachers, charismatic leaders, eloquent writers, tireless missionaries - and martyrs as well. The Spirit did this, the same spirit that hovered over the formless void at the beginning of everything; the same Spirit that drove Jesus into the desert after his baptism by John, the same Spirit that Jesus breathed upon his apostles and made them new creations with the power to forgive sins..

Every now and then the world gets disrupted. We’ve had other epidemics -- the black plague comes to mind. We’ve had wars. We’ve had technological revolutions that over the short term seemed to do far more harm than good; and it is as though every now and then the Spirit tears everything down so that it can be created anew. It is all there in the 104th psalm: “You take away their Spirit and they die and are gathered into dust; you send forth your spirit and they are created and you renew the face of the earth”.

Maybe this is our moment; maybe this is a time when heaven draws close to earth and we have the opportunity to make a big change for the better. Because the Spirit lives in each one of us and is always driving us to bring about the kingdom of heaven.

There is an art form in Japan called kintsugi. It begins with a broken pot or bowl. The artist painstakingly puts it back together using molten gold. In the end the broken vessel is more beautiful than it ever was before.

Is the Holy Spirit doing something like this? I would like to believe that. We’ve been broken; all the comfortable assumptions that took the place of trust in God have been turned over. Tomorrow won’t be like today; today isn’t like yesterday. Let us pray that the Spirit puts our world together so that it is better than before; let us pray that He will use this opportunity to renew the face of the earth.

Seventh Sunday of Easter, cycle A

In April of 2019, Pope Francis met with the Grand Imam Ahmad al Tayyeb of Al Azhar University. This was significant because the Grand Imam is a force for unity among Muslims, and vehemently opposed to terrorism in the name of Islam. So if there is anything remotely like a pope in Islam, Ahmad al Tayyeb is probably it. The two signed the “Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together”. It is a wonderful document, and would be worth reflecting on at length. But one statement led to a lot of controversy and push back from some Catholics as well as Muslims. It is this: “ The pluralism and the diversity of religions, color, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings.” Few people would argue with color, sex, race and language, but God willed pluralism and diversity of religions? That seems to fly in the face of anyone who thinks his or her religion is the true faith. So what’s going on here?

I don’t get all my prayers answered, at least the way I think they should be. But I guess I’m in good company. Jesus didn’t get all his prayers answered either. One prayer was that “if it was possible let this cup pass from me” and we know that wasn’t answered. Another prayer we hear at the end of today’s gospel passage:”That they may be one as we are one…” And of course we know that one of the scandals of Christianity is that after two thousand years we don’t seem to have that kind of unity. We have denominations too numerous to count; and even within our Church there are divisions. There are those who won’t go to Mass unless they can attend a tridentine mass in latin; there are those who are going to make a fuss over not being allowed to receive the Eucharist on the tongue during this pandemic. There are those who insist that they are Catholics but promote and condone abortion; If Jesus prayed for unity among his followers, it doesn't appear that the Father has answered that prayer.

But it’s almost unthinkable to suppose that the Father would not be answering his Son’s prayer, the Son who is one with him, the Son who sits at his right hand. So perhaps we should decide what unity looks like. There are three possibilities: one is that unity of the followers of Jesus means that they belong to a visible body, they believe the same things, they worship the same way. It seemed like that was the model in the first days of the Church. When you read the Acts of the Apostles, there are struggles as the church adjusts to the admission of gentiles, what parts of Judaism to keep and what parts to leave, and so on. And pressure from outside formed a fairly unified church, at least for a couple of centuries before things started breaking up again. Even the might of the Holy Roman Empire could not force external conformance on the Church. Many in our Catholic church still see this conformity as unity -- you are either in or out.

Another possibility is that unity is expressed by the lowest common denominator. “That this is eternal life, that they know you, the eternal God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” It’s likely that every Christian could agree with those words, and a few other sentiments. We all say the Our Father; most of us baptize and have some sort of Eucharistic celebration. But if that’s the unity Jesus was praying for, it seems particularly weak. It doesn’t seem to advance the Kingdom of Heaven; it certainly doesn’t do much to energize the main task of the Church which is the bringing about of the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth.

That leaves us with the third possibility. Jesus is praying for an eschatological unity. Eschatology is the branch of theology that begins with the assumption that what God says will come to pass will happen. And then we look for signs of that future in the present. That’s the story of Abraham,, by the way. God promised him that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky or the sands on the seashore. But Abraham died, with only one legitimate son. But in that son Abraham understood God’s promise would be carried out. And when Jesus tells us that the Kingdom of Heaven is among us, that’s an eschatological truth as well -- we can see signs of it in the good things that happen as his followers carry out his commandments, but we can also see that what is meant to be hasn’t happened yet.

The good thing about thinking eschatologically is that it gives us direction. If we are supposed to work for unity, and we are, because that is the desire of Jesus, introducing division would seem to be the last thing that would help. When we draw lines and say this side is right and that is wrong, and we won’t have anything to do with those on the wrong side, that causes even more division. My mother used to describe people like that as “holier than the pope”. The other extreme -- emphasizing our commonalities and minimizing those things that make us unique is not helpful either. That only introduces stagnation. If the differences between your group and mine are non-essential, then why not just leave things the way they are?

But when we work for eschatological unity, we look for things we share and in those areas we meet our neighbor, we have real unity, although nowhere near perfect. However, in doing so we create a space for the Holy Spirit to carry out Jesus’ will for us.

And we always have to remember that we will not see God’s plan come to fulfillment in our lifetimes; but you and I are what our ancestors in faith were working toward, just as we will have descendants for whom the Church will look very different than it does now. It will still be the Church, but it will have drawn closer to the unity that Jesus desires. And those descendants of ours will still be tempted to draw lines or to water down differences, because they will be human. But from God’s point of view, his plan will continue to unfold exactly as he wishes it to do so. So in some sense the Pope and the Imam are working toward unity -- a unity that has begun already, but is not there yet.

Sixth Sunday of Easter, cycle A

John 14:15 - 21

“If you love me you will keep my commandments” -- Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me.” There are some authorities who say that Jesus only gave one commandment -- “Love one another as I have loved you”. There are others who count thirty or even more -- but some of these are strictly speaking not commandments, and many are simply restating Old Testament commandments; and we Christians have already decided that we can pick and choose among those. We eat ham, we don’t mind mixing dairy with meat, we don’t circumcise for religious reasons, we don’t stone people who blaspheme. And some of Jesus' commandments are conditional and directed to individuals, like the rich young man -- “If you would be perfect go sell all you have, give to the poor, and come follow me” -- a commandment that still motivates a few people but not everyone, obviously.

But if you think of human love, love between a parent and child, or between a husband and wife, we can talk about unconditional love, but in reality, every example of human love is in some way conditional -- that means that it’s possible for one party to do something that destroys the love. Sure, a parent of a wayward child can claim to still love the child, but isn’t the love for something which has been lost, rather than the current real situation? Unconditional love is perfect love, and we can try, but we aren’t perfect. So I think the commandments Jesus is talking about are all variations of “Love one another as I have loved you.”

I ran across many commentaries on this passage. Most of them had some reference to the self-sacrificing love of Jesus demonstrated by his willing death on the cross. And some would lead from there to the idea that we aren’t really loving like Jesus until we actually loved, not just pretended to love, those we can’t stand, those outside our circle, those who think differently and act differently. And those are all good points. But when I think about the scene where Jesus is speaking to his apostles before his death -- and while Jesus knew of his upcoming death, I don’t think his apostles actually expected this would happen -- they would be thinking not about the crucifixion but about how Jesus had loved them in the past, and how he wished them to love in the future. And while I may never be able to love everyone with the kind of love Jesus demonstrated on the cross, I can love the way he loved his disciples.

So how did Jesus love his apostles, because those are the people to whom he is speaking. By the way, we know that at the last supper the apostles were there, but an old tradition going back to the second century says that some of the women who followed Jesus were there as well, including Mary Magdalene. So in thinking about how Jesus loved his apostles, Mary Magdalene will be there, at least in my mind.

The first way he loves them is that he is patient with them. Jesus could have done it all; being God, he didn’t need human help to carry out the ministry his Father gave him. But as we can see in the gospels, he takes pains to correct their misconceptions -- over and over again. When James and John seek special recognition, he gently reminds them that that isn’t his job to decide. When they become concerned that someone “not of our band” is teaching in Jesus’ name, he tells them that whoever is with him is not against him. And so on. And we see that he makes no effort to prevent one of them from leaving him. His invitation is gentle, but for those who accept it, he shapes them, teaches them, directs them.

Second, he sees their potential and encourages it. He sends his disciples out to heal, cast out demons, and preach. They return elated. He sends Mary Magdalene to the apostles with the news that he has risen from the dead -- a woman is the first to know, a woman who is a second class citizen in her time. And when Peter and Thomas and Philip at different times recognize his true nature as Son of God, he confirms and expands what they see.

Third, he forgives them. When Peter tells him that he’s wrong to predict his suffering and death, Jesus calls Peter “Satan”, but never wavers in his friendship. When Peter denies that he knows Jesus, on the shores of the lake after the resurrection Jesus puts him in charge of the Church. When his disciples desert him in his last few tortured hours of his life, he comes to them after the Resurrection and offers them peace. When Thomas refuses to believe the disciples, he makes a special appearance to remedy that.

-- to be patient with everyone, to try to bring out the best in the people I meet, to forgive people unreservedly -- these choices are not beyond my capacity. I may not be able right now to love with pure agape love, with total self sacrificing love, but I can love as Jesus loved his disciples. So keep Jesus’ commandments and you will experience his love for you.