Pray for us St. Jude

30^th Sunday of OT and feast of St. Jude:

What a great weekend for our parish.  We are celebrating the feast day of our patron, St. Jude.  He was an apostle and friend of the Lord.  He is our friend as well and he is praying for us, leading us, and guiding us.  St. Jude, pray for us.  We were also blessed yesterday that Bishop Rhoades joined us for the celebration of the sacrament of confirmation.  He called down the Holy Spirit on 45 of our young people.  It was a great Mass and a moving experience for all who were there.  Indeed, this is a great weekend, we get to experience God’s love and guidance.

Not only that, but in our gospel, we also hear about love.  But, maybe in a slightly different way.  In the gospel, Jesus gives us the great commandments: love God above all things and love your neighbor as yourself. 

Now, I’m sure we are all quite familiar with this gospel message.  I know that I learned from an early age that the great commandments tell us to love God, our neighbor, and ourselves.  So, this might not seem like a new message.  But, something really struck me as new when I was thinking about this passage.  I think there is a tension hidden inside of these commandments.

Has it ever struck you as strange that God commands us to love?  Doesn’t that seem incompatible?  We all know what a command is.  A command is an injunction ordering one to do something or to avoid something.  You shall not steal, this command seems quite straight forward.  But, love seems quite different right?  Love is a free act whereby a person actively wills the good and the intentions of another.  So, how or why do we follow this command to love God, neighbor, and self?

I think the first question to ask is why should we love God?  I think there are two reasons people often use to try to love God.   Neither is bad, but I think they can end up being incomplete.  First, there is this notion of duty.  We love God because it is a duty, he has commanded it, we must try to do it.  And, it’s true.  I do think we have a duty to love God.  But, simply thinking about the command to love God and our neighbor as a duty certainly seems to take away some of the awe, wonder, and excitement of love.  If love was simply a duty, doesn’t that seem kind of boring sometimes?  I mean, I have a duty to pay my taxes.  But, I don’t find that particularly thrilling.  Think about St. Jude and all the other martyrs.  They literally died because of their love for Christ.  Now that’s exciting.  I doubt he thought of it as some dispassionate duty, but rather it was something much more.

However, this leads me to the other reason to love God that is also incomplete.  Many times we try our best to love God because it leads to pleasant emotions.  In other words, loving God feels good sometimes, so that is why we do it.  Now, I’m not saying loving God shouldn’t feel good.  I had a great holy hour this morning before Mass.  I could definitely feel God’s presence.  It was wonderful.  But, we don’t always FEEL great when it comes to loving God.  Sometimes our life of faith is tough, sometimes it’s the cross.  We might be tempted to think that something is going wrong.  But, it’s not.  Love is not simply a matter of feelings.  Love is a decision to give one’s life for the good of another.  Sometimes that feels great.  Sometimes it doesn’t.  That’s ok.

So if we shouldn’t love God simply out of duty, nor simply for the good feelings it can cause sometimes, why should we love God?  Bishop Rhoades said it so well yesterday at the confirmation mass that I told him I was going to steal it for today’s mass.  At the end of his homily he was encouraging all the young people to embrace their vocation to holiness, to strive to be saints.  He said, “being a follower of Jesus is a great adventure, and if you follow him you will have a wonderful life.  If you don’t follow him, your life will be boring and mediocre.  Jesus is calling you to a life of greatness.”  Why should we love God?  Because we want a life of greatness.  We should love God because we don’t want to be mediocre.  We should love God because following Christ is the only pathway to a life of fulfillment and peace. 

This is why the saints are so inspiring to me.  They certainly followed these 2 great commands of Jesus.  But, they did so not simply out of duty or because of emotions.  They followed these commands because they recognized that following Christ is the only great adventure that satisfies the longing of our hearts.  So, as we celebrate this feast day of St. Jude, we ask him to pray for us.  May we emulate his great love for Christ and follow in his footsteps along the great adventure of faith.