6th Sunday of Easter 2015
Last Sunday, after the 5:30 Mass, someone found me as I was leaving to go
home after a long day. He told me that he had been coming to St. Ignatius
for a while now and how much he loved to be here. He said “there is so
much love in this place”. I thanked him and left.
I had expected him to say “the music is wonderful, the preaching is good,
the church is beautiful, the community is welcoming.” I didn’t expect to
hear “there is so much love in this place”. In the light of the Scriptures we
have just heard, I think that’s a very appropriate comment.
There’s so much love in this place. That’s what I was thinking about
yesterday morning as 35 young children received the Eucharist for the first
time. With these little children, their parents, grandparents, siblings, friends,
there was so much love in this place. I was going to ask the children how
much love is in this place. This much, this much, this much. From floor to
ceiling, from back to front. All this love somehow contained in this building
of stone and wood.
If you think about it, there is always “so much love” in this place. You see it
and feel it at when we celebrate the baptism of a child, a love infused with
joy and hope for the future of this child. You see it and feel it when we
celebrate a wedding, a love infused with joy and hope for the future. You see
it and feel it when we celebrate a funeral, a love infused with grief and
gratitude. You see it and feel it on a Mother’s Day Sunday when we are with
our mothers or we remember the love of a mother who has died. This love is
at the heart of every Eucharist, even when we may not feel it. Why, because
God, who draws us here, is Love. How can there not be “so much love” in
this place?
Two weeks ago, I used the quote of Pope Francis from his Joy of the Gospel:
“infinite sadness can only be cured by infinite love”. If my focus then was
on infinite sadness, today must be infinite love.
Isn’t that what we hear today? God’s love for us in Jesus Christ cannot be
measured. There are no limits to the ways in which God loves us. We are
invited into a relationship of love with God that is so intimate: As the father
has loved me, so I have loved you. Remain in my love. (It should make us
tingly all over).
Now we are only human and so we know there are limits to the ways in
which we love. Hurt, pain, disappointment, sorrows—the “stuff” of life can
make us “miserly” when it comes to responding in love. We measure, we
hold back, we give only “so much” of ourselves.
But thanks be to God, God is not that way. God cannot help but love us and
draw us into himself. Isn’t it lovely that on the day we hear these scriptures
about Love itself, we celebrate our mothers. It’s a good reminder that God’s
love is maternal, life giving, compassionate. Or as Julian of Norwich calls
our tender mother Jesus, who gives us his life in the Eucharist, whose body
and blood we share as we once shared our mother’s body and blood in the
womb.
There is so much love in this place because God is love and God is with us
here. There is so much love in this place because Christ Jesus humbled
himself, taking the form of a slave, dying on a cross so that we might have
life in its fullness. We know that infinite love cannot be contained and yet in
this Eucharist, in bread and wine, we receive this infinite love, a love that
knows no limits. And that’s the true Joy of the Gospel.