Today’s question is a catechetical one. It comes from both the old “Baltimore Catechism” and the new “Catechism of the Catholic Church.” It’s this: What are the three theological virtues? What are the three major graces given to us by God? Yes, they are, of course: faith, hope and charity (or love). Faith, hope, and love are the three gifts we heard about in our three readings for today. Faith, a gift which relates to our past, Hope, a gift for our future, and Love, a gift for our present.
Our first reading is from Luke’s Acts of the Apostles. Luke writes about the past, about what the apostles Paul and Barnabas did on their missionary journeys. He wrote about how they exhorted new Christians, new disciples of Christ “… to persevere in the faith” given to them. In today’s reading, Luke recalled how Paul and Barnabas appointed elders in each of the communities, the churches, they established and how they “… commended them to the Lord in whom they had put their faith.” Luke recalled how, when Paul and Barnabas returned to Antioch, the founding home of the first Christians, how these two apostles “… reported what God had done with them and how he had opened the door of faith to the gentiles.”
And what is this “door of faith” opened by God, this gift of God given to us in the virtue called faith? To have faith is to believe that God exists, that this God is good, that all God has given us is good, that all of creation is good. It is through the gift of faith that we read our salvation history and know that God is our origin: God is our past.
And it is through the gift, the virtue of hope, we believe we know with our entire being that God is also our future. The Father who created us has sent us the Holy Spirit to lead us into the future and this future is good, no matter how difficult the past might seem. The kingdom of God is our destiny.
We, and the early Christians, heard about this future hope in our second reading from John’s book of Revelation. We heard how the sea, the chaos of the present world, would be no more. We heard how the Jerusalem of Israel, the most holy place on this earth for those first Christians, would be no more. Instead, there would be a “new Jerusalem,” a new city of beauty, of stability, and of light: a light emanating from the Lamb of God, himself. And in this city, God would dwell alongside its residents. In this new city, God “… will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there shall be no more death or mourning, wailing or pain, for the old order has passed away.”
But what about the present? This time when chaos still exists, when there is still death and mourning, when there is still wailing and pain. Still there are tears. How do we survive in this present between the time of the faith of the first Christians until the time of the hope for the “new Jerusalem?”
The answer, the only answer, comes in our gospel reading. God has gifted us not only with faith and hope but, most importantly, with the gift of love. And it is a special kind of love. Love for one another. Jesus spoke these words to his disciples, his friends and to us: “As I have loved you, so you also should love one another. This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
“Love for one another.” This love makes the present tolerable. This love allows us to wait in hope for the new Jerusalem. “Love one another as I have loved you.” But what kind of love did Jesus, himself, practice? Just how are we to love one another?
Given that this weekend we celebrate Mother’s Day, I would suggest that perhaps the love of a mother for her child is much like the love of Jesus for his friends. With maternal love, one loves the offspring for who the child is and not for who the child will become. Not for what you do, or will do, for me. Not for what you have done or have accomplished; but rather that you exist, merely that you are. Maternal love says: I love you because you have been an intimate part of me and yet you are now your own person.
Nurturing love, maternal love, promotes growth and independence; yet it has a concern about separation and potential harm to the beloved. It is both a protecting love and a releasing love. Maternal love both embraces and yet it frees one from bondage.
The love Jesus gave to his friends, and to us, is love with forgiveness. It is love which exists even when the lover knows that the beloved is less than what the beloved is capable of being. Jesus showed us from his cross that forgiveness is not approval of what is wrongly done so much as it is loving someone without considering what the person has done wrong. Love with forgiveness is starting over, time after time, without harboring feelings of ill-will about the past.
It is with this kind of love that Christians are to await the coming of the “new Jerusalem.” It is with the faith, hope and love of a mother for her child that we live out the new commandment, the new order: “Love one another – as I have loved you.”
Fifth Sunday of Easter; May 9, 2004 (Mothers’ Day)
Acts 14:21-27; Rev 21:1-5a; Jn 13:31-33a, 34-35