HOMILY FOR THE 5TH SUNDAY OF EASTER YEAR C
THEME: “LOVE ONE ANOTHER EVEN AS I HAVE LOVED YOU”
BY: Fr. Arthur Ntembula
HOMILY FOR SUNDAY MAY 15 2022
(Acts 14:21-27, Revelation 21:1-5, John 13:31-33.34-35)
The ascension of Jesus into heaven is close at hand. And so as Jesus prepares to bid his disciples farewell, he leaves them the commandment of love. He says, “Love one another as I have loved you. By this, all men will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.” He gives us the commandment of love as the expression of our belonging to him and to the Christian family. He wants us to share love and make it our way of life. God, the source and definition of love, by sending Jesus to us taught us that words of love are supposed to be supported by actions of love. He never just said he loved us. He also showed it in the actions of love. When Jesus commands us today to love one another, he wants us to use love as a tool for transforming the way we live and treat each other.
Love is a powerful tool that can make this earth a place where we can all live in harmony. None would go to bed on an empty stomach. Everybody would be concerned about the welfare of everybody else. Jesus wants us to live in a communion of love, respect, fraternity and dignity. We cannot achieve this unless love drives our thoughts and actions. When we look around, we see that there is a lot of hate in our world. There is less and less of community life and more and more of individualism, antagonism and everything else that stands in the way of love. We are building a closed world rather than an outgoing one where everyone would raise their eyes to see the pain of those who are suffering and be moved to show them gestures of love. As a Christian community, Jesus invites us to be different from what we see out there. And he sends us into a world full of hate to preach love and spread love. Unless we encourage our world to spread more and more love, hate will always determine how we live.
Love is not complicated. It is a simple virtue with which we can create a better world for ourselves and for those coming after us. The wars that we hear about in different parts of the world, terrorism, poverty and all the other experiences that do not give birth to hope, peace and happiness in people’s lives, all these are a result of the lack of the value that could improve our world: Love. Today, we should all resolve to spread more love than anything else and we will see how much of the multiplication effect this would have. Gestures of love can be demonstrated even in the simplest ways as giving a glass of water to whoever asks for one without considering race, ethnicity, social class or tribe.
Jesus loved us until he died on the cross. This means that you can’t love without sacrifice. In our lives, we must try to get out of our comfort zones and put ourselves at the service of others. This is sacrifice and makes us true friends of Jesus and it is what we should teach our world. Love is simple. It creates a community of people where every member is important. We have to go outside to spread this value among the members of our families, but also among the people we meet on the streets. Christians do not wear badges; we know them by the way they love.
ENJOY YOUR LITURGY
Fr. Arthur Ntembula