HOMILY OF FIFTH THURSDAY OF EASTER YEAR B
HOMILY OF FIFTH THURSDAY OF EASTER YEAR B
HOMILY THEME: REMAIN IN MY LOVE
Fr. Deotacious Chikontwe SMA
Acts 15:7-21, Psalm 95:1-3,10, John 15:9-11
INTRODUCTION
Good morning my dear brothers and sisters in Christ, today we celebrate Thursday of the 5th Week of the Easter Season.
FROM OUR FIRST READING
In our first reading today, we heard of the continuation of the story, when the Church was being divided on the issue of whether the Christian faithful ought to obey and follow the whole suit of the entire Jewish laws, customs, rituals and practices which was the favoured position of those who converted to the Christian faith from among the Pharisees and the more hardline ones among the Jewish people, demanding the Gentiles or the non-Jewish people to adopt wholesale the entire rules and laws concerning the Jewish customs and practices. This would have made it very difficult for the non-Jewish Christian converts to live their lives and consequently would have placed great burden on all those who seek to live their lives faithfully in God’s path.
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FROM OUR GOSPEL READING
In the short gospel reading this morning there is a strong emphasis on love, God the Father’s love for Jesus, Jesus’ love for all of us, and his call on us to remain in his love. The call to remain in Jesus’ love suggests that we already find ourselves within his love and our task is to remain there. In other words, the Lord’s love for us is a given; we don’t have to look for it or work for it. We are born into the Lord’s love; we are baptized into his love. We only have to remain there. The call to remain in the Lord’s love suggests that we can remove ourselves from his love. The Lord does not remove his love from us, but we can fall out of his love, as it were.
CONCLUSION
Dear friends, Communion with Christ is so important but how do we go about it? Today’s gospel tells us how. It is by keeping God’s Commandment that we can remain in Him and remain in His love. It is because Christ Himself keeps it and remains in His love. Constancy of God’s love is what makes it different from our love. It is because our love is fickle, temperamental and fluctuating. Our love depends upon our moods, feelings, circumstances and successes. But God’s love is unchanging and always faithful. What only changes, is our openness to God’s love and our response to His call and grace. We remain in His love when our love learns to depend more and more upon His love. Somebody said: “The more I am aware of His love, His blessings and His kind will toward me, the more I will respond with constancy. To remain in His love is to live permanently in an attitude and posture of grateful self-giving, to seek and give what He is asking.”
May God bless you always
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