May Jesus Christ be praised and may his holy Mother pray for
us.
Saint Paul writes that in the end, there are three things
that remain: faith hope and love. Of
these three things, St. Paul writes, the greatest is love. Today in the midst of the prophetic call of
the prophet Jeremiah and the prophetic rejection of the Lord Jesus in the
synagogue at Nazareth, the Apostle Paul teaches us about love. In teaching us about love, we learn about
faith and hope as well.
When we speak of faith, hope and love we are speaking about the
three theological virtues. This means
that they are given by God and through them we are drawn closer to God. Faith is that virtue by which we believe in
God and in all that God has revealed to us through creation, through the
prophets, in the Lord Jesus, and through his Church. Our response of faith is given in response to
the invitation of God. When we speak of
the virtue of hope, we mean that virtue by which we desire the kingdom of
heaven and eternal life as our true happiness, relying on the promises of
Christ. St. Peter reminds us in his
first letter that we must always be prepared to give a defense for our
hope. We must always place our true hope
in the promises of the Lord Jesus who is the divine physician and the conqueror
of sin and death. Love, dear brothers
and sisters, is the virtue by which we love God above all things, and love God
for his own sake, and we love our neighbors as ourselves out of love for
God. Love is the greatest virtue,
because only love is an eternal virtue.
Only love, dear brothers and sisters, will endure when this
world passes away. There will only be
love in the kingdom of the Father. Faith
will have passed away, because we will see with unveiled faces the glory of the
one in whom we have believed. We will
see him face to face, and there will be no need for faith, because we will know
as we have been known. There will be no
hope in the kingdom, because the promises of Christ in which we have placed our
hope will have been fulfilled. The one
in whom all hope is placed will grant us a place in his presence. Only love will endure. Only the love that is patient and kind, only
the love that is not jealous or inflated or rude or selfish will find a place
in the kingdom. Only the love shown to
us in the Lord Jesus, who offered himself in suffering and sacrifice, will
endure to eternal life. Everything else
will pass away. Prophecy and tongues and
knowledge and all other spiritual gifts will all fall away before the love that
conquers all things.
And this, dear brothers and sisters, is the love that God has
for us. This eternal love has been
offered to us and shared with us from the foundation of the world. Like the prophet Jeremiah, who was called and
loved by God before he was formed in the womb, we were loved by God and called
to love by God even before our grandparents met each other. The eternal love that God has for us, and the
eternal love that God has shared with us, is the eternal love that is given to
us so that we can give it away. God has
shared his love so that we can share his love.
There is no greater gift that God has entrusted to our care than the
gift of his own love. When we love as
God loves, when we love as Christ has shown us to love, then eternal life has
begun in our souls.
As we now enter into the mystery of love and share in the
total offering of the love of the Lord Jesus, let us renew our faith in all that
God has revealed to us. Let us acclaim
our hope in the promises of Christ. And
let us love Christ, as Christ has loved us, and embrace the eternal love of the
Father. Amen.
Preached at Our Lady of Lourdes
Catholic Church, Monroe, NC
