What's Love Got to Do With It?

Friday of the Fifth Week of Easter
Readings may be found here
 
In Christians settings, we talk a great deal about love, and rightly so. After all, at the heart of our faith is the conviction that God is Love. In the gospel passage today, Jesus sums up the life of discipleship with one command: “love one another.” That command has a context in Jesus’ own stance of loving, unselfish, gift for us. He reveals the depth and breadth of the command by His life and ministry and in the nature of His sacrificial death. 
 
Saying all this still leaves the challenge for each of us in discerning the call of love daily, and in every kind of circumstances. Too often, popular culture reduces love to sentiment or desire. The love we imitate in Christ risks, gives, sweats, and bleeds for the beloved. It is a way of living, not a passing fancy. Look to those early Christians in Acts as they struggle with the everyday challenges of a small and vulnerable community in a world of violence and oppression. Their love for one another expresses itself in so many concrete ways. Today, we hear about the ongoing struggle to unify a multicultural body of disciples. They work with each other to find solutions that are charitable – meant to strengthen their bonds even if each must sacrifice in some way. 
 
In the midst of the pandemic, all of us can give witness to the way in which friends, neighbors, and strangers have adapted to extraordinary circumstances with generous hearts. The everyday ordinary and extraordinary deeds, risks, and care one for another is a wonder to behold. It is the mystery of love unfolding in our midst. “Do ordinary things with extraordinary love…” Saint Mother Teresa.
 

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