6th Sunday of Easter
Maryland State Knights of Columbus Convention
St. John Neumann Church
May 4, 2024
‘Give as Good as You Get’
Already deep into an election year, we see candidates sparring with one another. Not to put too fine a point on it, their sparring is often neither edifying nor informative. In fact, it’s an ugly spectacle. The name of the game is “to give as good as you get.”
“To give as good as you get!” That is the way not only of politics but of the world. I don’t mean good-natured teasing or reasonably sane practical jokes, but rather, matching insult for insult and injury for injury. It is a culture in which revenge is confused with justice, and meanness is confused with courage.
What We Get
Today’s Scriptures turn the phrase, ‘to give as good as you get’, on its head. They inspire us not only to transform the meaning of that phrase, but they also reveal why and how our lives should be different, radically different, from the world around us. Put another way, as Catholic Christians and as members of the Knights of Columbus, we should be a counter sign to the world precisely by the way we ‘give as good as we get’.
The short passage from the First Letter of John clues us into what it is we get, and what it is we should be giving. St. John tells us that ‘we should love one another because love is of God.’ He goes on to instruct us that we really cannot know God unless we love, for God not only loves, but indeed “God is love.” Moreover, the statement, “God is love”, is not an abstraction, a nice idea without anything to back it up. On the contrary, the God who is love revealed himself by sending his Son into the world to redeem us of our sins so that we could share, for all eternity, in an ocean of divine love. Summing up, St. John declares, ‘Love, then, consists in this: not that we have loved God, but that God has loved us and sent his son as an expiation for our sins!” So, this is what we have received: the God who is love has given himself to us. No wonder St. Paul exalted,
“O the depths of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God.
How inscrutable his judgments and how unsearchable his ways!” (Rom 11:33).
What We Give
If the First Letter of John reminds us of what we have gotten, in the Gospel of John Jesus teaches us what we must give. Jesus teaches us that if we would love God, we must obey his commandments – and his commandment is this: “Love one another as I love you!” This is what it really means to give as good as you get: “Love one another as I love you”. We are to love others as God has first loved us. We are to love others as Jesus loves us.
What does it mean to love another the way Jesus loves us? It means that Jesus has communicated to us the immense beauty and depth of God’s love for us – above all by laying down his life for us. It also means that his love for us has not diminished with the passage of time. Rather, “the love of God is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit” (Rom 5:5). His love is poured into the sacraments we receive – especially the Eucharist, such, that none of us can say that God’s love is distant, absent, unattainable. Christ has communicated to us the unsearchable depths of his Father’s love and he has chosen us to be immersed in his love, to remain in his love, to absorb his love in the depth of our souls and the recesses of our hearts. And when this happens, everything changes. We live differently. We give as good as we get: we love as we have been loved.
Witnesses to Love
As the love of Christ continually transforms us, something else happens. We become witnesses to love, witnesses to what the Lord is doing in us & for us. By loving others with the same love with which God has love us, we bear witness to the God who is love, the God who loves us ‘more than we could ever ask or imagine’ (cf. Eph 3:20). When the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles in the Upper Room and filled them with knowledge and love of Jesus Christ, they bore witness to Christ’s love to the ends of the earth. So also with us. Love alone is credible. Love alone makes us credible witnesses. This is how we are to distinguish ourselves in the world. This is how Christians have always distinguished themselves in the world! “By this,” said Jesus, all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).
All of which brings us to the moment at hand: our Maryland State Convention. What a blessing the Knights of Columbus is to the Church: a world-wide fraternity of men and their families united in charity – united in charity, in God’s love, as our first and foundational principle. It is as Blessed Michael McGivney took today’s Scripture readings and distilled them into the fraternal organization he founded to strengthen the faith of husbands and fathers and to provide a means of mutual assistance for families in distress. If the standard set in today’s readings seems impossibly high for us to reach, we have only to look to our founder who gave us a pathway to live he love we profess – to give as good as we get – and in the process, to draw other men and their families into the circle of divine love, so that they too can be the friends of the Lord in the communion of the Church. Charity, Unity, Fraternity, and Patriotism . . . Let us give as good as we get! Vivat Jesus!