A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. Jesus said to his disciples, as the father has loved me, so I have loved you. Live on in my love. You will live in my love if you keep my commandments even as I have kept my father's commandments and live in his love. All this I tell you that my joy may be yours and that your joy may be complete.
This is my commandment. Love one another as I have loved you. There is no greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I no longer speak of you as slaves, for a slave does not know what his master is about.
Instead, I call you friends since I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my father. It was not you who chose me. It was I who chose you to go forth and to bear fruit. Your fruit must endure so that everything you ask the father in my name, he will give you. The commandment I give you is this, that you love one another, and this is the gospel of the lord.
Praise to you, lord Jesus Christ. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. So many thoughts come to one's mind in reading this text. This is a the text appointed for the feast of Saint Matthias. But you see, it's it's what we've been reading from the book of the acts.
It's a it it repeats what we have been reading. As a matter of fact, this is from that long, long address of our lord which Saint John recounts puts together for at on the occasion of the last supper. Now there are two points I'd like to present to you. The first, I I from time to time, I have used this word love and have from time to time said that the best thing we could do with it would be to eliminate it as a word because it has so many meanings that it has no meaning. Then I pointed out more recently still that the word love, as our Lord uses it, often has an explanation of it right after.
Now in today's text, our lord talks about love, but he brings in the word friendship. Now that's the first little point I'd like to make, and the second has to do with this standard or the criterion of love. But, see, we love when two people are in love, as we to use that expression, put that in quotation marks. We know what we mean. This romantic, a wonderful state of mind and body and soul and which envelops our whole being, which occurs more or less once or twice or maybe more, and who knows, during life.
We are in love. And one of the characteristics of that kind of a a situation is that these lovers, put it in quotation marks, look at each other. They're enthralled. They're enraptured with each other. They feel that they can't live without each other, that life would be empty unless their lives are united.
And it's it's a tremendous experience. Of course, one thing about it, it doesn't last. But anyway, that's this business of love. But when you bring in friendship, in many instances, the attachment of friendship is that two people are looking at a third something or other. A husband and wife are looking at their children.
They're united in in relationships to each other in their love for their child. Two partners in a business are, we say, friends, And they're looking not at each other and telling each other how much they love them, which lovers do, but they're saying, how's the business going? What can we do to improve the business? You take a a gang of boys on a baseball team, They're not looking at each other all the time and saying how I how we love one another. They're saying, what can we do to win the game outside of killing our opponents?
This is an important this is something I think frightfully important because you see in in in in marriage, which has its problems, I'm told, you see, if all they can do is look at each other, what are they looking at? Fallible, erring human beings, no better or no worse than the other. Furthermore, if all they have is a commitment to each other, there's as I say, there's one thing you can say for sure for that relationship, it will change. It's absolutely sure to change. And it will change either for the better, for something much better, or it will change for something much worse.
But change, it will. Absolutely, surely change. And so unless there's a third something brought in there, I don't say glue to hold it together. Oh, no. That's not the point at all.
But to have a third something where instead of looking at each other and telling each other how much they love each other, they're looking at a third thing and saying how much we love that. And because we love that, we are close together with each other. So I have a great respect for for this thing called friendship. I know a lot more about that than I know about this word love. Now the second point is this.
When you read Saint John, you would think that all our Lord was talking about was God and neighbor. Here's another instance where you can lift text and you can get anything you want out of a text. But you see, there's more to it than God and neighbor. Because what is the standard of loving your neighbor? See?
What's this what what standard did did God did our Lord give us for loving my neighbor? He just didn't say go out and love your neighbor. It's what Saint John has here. But if you read the the four gospels, you'll see that it's a little different. That they that it's that I must love my neighbor as I love myself, and that the first commandment is love of god.
So we are not talking about a binary number. You're talking about a a trilogy. The the commandment of god involves three entities. First, god almighty without any equivocation. The first commandment, I am the lord, your god.
You owe me everything, and so give something back to me. I don't owe you anything. You didn't choose me. I first chose you. Our blessed lord said that today.
And so we have this that first thing. The first object of love is not is god. Nothing else. And then the second command is is love your neighbor as yourself. You've got to bring yourself into this thing.
Love of neighbor is it does not exclude self at all. It's it's it's a third kind of love. Because my first love is to God and the second love is to myself. Because our blessed Lord raised that love as a standard for my loving my neighbor. So let's not get all warped and lopsided as as is so common today where you think everything in life is just giving yourself to your neighbor.
You see, this is so trite. It is so empty. It is so absurd. John Stuart Mill tried it. That was his great what do you think is the origin of altruism?
Because you see, you can be the most altruistic person in God's earth. But the question remains for any rationalistic person such as myself is why should I love my neighbor? Why should I be an altruist, out there, you know the other? Why? What's the obligation?
On what do you base it? Why should I love anything more than I love myself? Why? Now if you tell me I'm supposed to love my neighbor above everything, you've gotta give me a very good reason for it, a very good reason, and there isn't any. Altruism doesn't work.
It only works where you have a very generous minded human being who is living, don't forget this, who is living on the backwash of Christianity. Remember, John Stuart Mill was living in Victorian England. He wasn't living in a vacuum. So that this this commandment of love that you hear so much about, remember, it's a trilogy. It's God and you and then your neighbor because your first duty is to save your life, your soul.
Your salvation is your first duty to yourself, and then you're supposed to love your neighbor as you love yourself. But you see overall is God. God's first. God is first. Not neighbor, not myself.
You can't you see, here's the you just take this word philanthropy. You just take that just that word, the love of philanthropy means love of human beings. See how we've shifted our we don't talk about charity, which means the love of God first, the love of self second, and then the love of neighbor as myself because I love God. You see that third entity there? Whereas philanthropy says, look at man how wonderful he is.
Love him. Fine. Except I know a lot I don't love at all if I was left to myself. And there are a lot of people won't love me either if they're left to themselves. And so this commandment of love that we has thrown around, it's complicated.
It's not easy. And in practice, it's even more complicated in a sense. But in another sense, it's very simple. As long as we put god first, we establish my relationship to god, and then like the hub on a old bicycle wheel, if the hub is lined up with the rim or the rim lined up with the hub, however you used to do it, then you know the spokes will all be lined up one with another. In the name of the father and the son, holy spirit.
Amen.