OMELIE / Omelie EN

18 mag 2025

18/05/2025 - 5th Sunday of Easter - Year C

18/05/2025 - 5^th Sunday of Easter - Year C

Reading 1 ACTS 14,21-27 Psalm 144 Reading 2 REV 21,1-5 Gospel JN 13,31-33.34-35

“It is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the kingdom of God”. With these words Paul and Barnabas instructed the communities they had shaped and gathered. They were not promising the new Christians a good and comfortable life, just like Jesus had never promised one. Jesus himself had made it clear: “If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you” and “they will cast you out ..., persecute you, hand you over to the judges and magistrates”, but also “blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account”!

The necessity of hardships is part of the Christian's life. And we discover it, every time we decide to live our faith with some seriousness. Every day, that very television that we pay for to offer us serious information and dignified and formative pastimes, throws in our faces instead what can be harmful to our faith, offers us offensive words and insulting speeches against us and against our shepherds; the same can be said of those newspapers and magazines we fill our homes and our imagination with or which we place in the hands of children and young people.

“It is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the kingdom of God”. When he says this, St Paul has already been driven out of some cities, he had to flee from Damascus lowered from the walls in a basket, he was stoned and believed dead in Lystra. He will still suffer beatings and imprisonment, but always with the joy of being faithful to his Lord Jesus Christ.

Today's Gospel reading presents us with a particular moment of Jesus' sufferings: Judas leaves the room of the Last Supper. Leaving that place, he abandons the communion with the other disciples and especially communion with Jesus.

What will he do? Which end will he meet? Jesus suffers for him, and for himself. He senses that the moment of passion and death is coming. For him, this moment is the hour in which he can manifest his greatest love, he can thus “glorify” the Father. And with that same love his divine greatness will be manifested.

He will enter death: this is not the time for his own people to accompany him, but every moment is always suitable to do what he does, that is, showing the Father's love. And they will do this by loving “one another” with the same intensity as Jesus.

What does it mean to love “one another”? It does not only mean loving others: this love could also be driving us to pride, that makes us think we are fine, good, deserving, even better than others.

To love “one another” is to accept our brother's love, to appreciate it, to interpret his gestures towards me as love. What my brothers do to me is God's love for me, even though I may not like it, even though it may make me suffer. But the Lord knows what is good for me.

Loving “one another” involves first of all the humility of accepting that I need the attention of my brothers, and considering them better than me. I consider them God's gift to me.

And since Jesus always loved everyone, we too will love, focusing our eyes on him. To the question ‘Why do you love?’ we will therefore always answer by saying, first of all to ourselves, ‘Because Jesus loved us’, ‘because Jesus loved you and also me’. He is the deserving one.

By living this love “for one another” we will shine forth the glory of Jesus, and we will be recognised as his disciples. It is not our words or our prayers that distinguish us as disciples of the Lord, but the communion with one another that unites us also in language, also in prayer, but above all in the serene and faithful attention to listening and helping one another.

Loving “one another” is certainly beautiful, but it comes at a cost. If you have tried it, you know what that cost is. This is the first hardship we offer to God so that he may welcome us into his Kingdom. The hardship of loving one another will fill us with joy, that joy that will be able to wipe away the tears of all other hardships, the ones coming from those who speak ill of us and those who work injustice against our faith.