A Homily for Friday of the Fifth Week of Easter
Friday, May 23, 2025
Prince of Peace Catholic Church – 8:00 Mass
Acts 15:22-31; Psalm 57:8-9, 10 and 12; John 15:12-17
Audio Recording
Jesus’ command, “Love one another as I love you”, is FOUNDATIONAL to the entire Christian life. It is so simple and yet so difficult. Jesus requires that as his disciples we practice the same kind of radical, self-giving love as he practiced..
When we look upon the cross in faith, we see the love of God revealed, a love that is totally self-giving for others’ good. It is this same love that Jesus tells us we must practice. One reason why it is so difficult to love as Jesus does is that we are sinners, bound up in prideful selfishness. To love as God does, we must be constantly dying to our own sinfulness and selfishness and living for God. And we live for God by obeying the Father’s will and loving one another.
We need God’s help to love others in this way. To produce the fruits of love, we must remain on the vine and be pruned by the Father. If we insist on holding on to our perceived entitlements, our grudges, our anger, and our judgements of others then we are not living the life of love that Christ intends for us.
In fact, by doing these things we are pushing people away from us, rather than drawing them to us. The bottom line is that we must develop an attitude of service of others to grow in Christ’s love, rather than only thinking about our own selfish desires.
If we only go through the MOTIONS of our faith, regularly attending Mass and saying our prescribed prayers, without entering into deeper communion with Christ by spending time with him in meditative prayer and listening to him speak to us about how we need to change, then there’s a good chance that we aren’t producing the good fruit of love because we are not allowing God to speak to us, to prune us.
When we are pruned by God we will begin to think differently about others and change our ideas about our own self-importance. This is how we grow in love.
In today’s gospel reading Jesus commands us to love one another and to go and bear fruit that will remain, so that whatever we ask the Father in his name he may give us. Notice that Jesus tells us that bearing his fruit in our lives is essential to having our prayers being answered by the Father. This is because when we produce the fruit of love in our lives, our will is aligned with God’s will.
Our prayers should always be for his will to be done, not our own. We must acknowledge that God knows best in all matters and that we only desire what he wants for us, even if that may be difficult for us to accept.
When we pray in Jesus’ name to the Father, we are praying in communion with Jesus in his perfect, loving obedience to the Father’s will. We ask the Father to accomplish his plan in the world and in our lives and, if we are ready to obey the Father and yield to his will, the Father will give us our request.
Let’s remember today that If we are to love others as God does, we need to remain and grow in communion with Jesus, through meditative prayer, the sacraments, and works of service and penance. Through these spiritual practices, we open ourselves to God’s action in us and increasingly die to our own sinfulness so as to become conformed to the Father’s will. This is the narrow road to life that we are to walk as Christians.
Only by walking down this road will we come to joyfully experience the Father’s love and be able to love others as he calls us to do.
God bless you.