MY daily reflection and prayer:
Friday , April 29, 2016
Fifth Week of Easter
Memorial of Saint Catherine of Siena, Virgin and Doctor of the Church
Dear my friends,
Here is the Gospel for us today according to St. John 15:12-17
Jesus said to his disciples: “This is my commandment: love one another as I love you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father. It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you. This I command you: love one another.”
This is the Gospel of the Lord. Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ.
***
“NO one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends,” says Jesus Christ in today’s Gospel. What does it mean for us today?
Pope-Emeritus Benedict XVI writes in his encyclical, “Deus Caritas Est”, that love is not merely a sentiment; it is an act of will. “God does not demand of us a feeling which we ourselves are incapable of producing” (n. 17).
We cannot be ordered to fall in love with someone. But, when we experience God’s love for us, the joy of being loved must lead us to want to respond to that love.
St. Catherine of Siena wrote, “Lord, you are Food of angels, giving Yourself with fire of love to men! You are the garment which covers our nakedness. You feed us with Your sweetness, because You are all sweetness, with no bitterness…”
In the Perpetual Adoration of the Eucharist, while worshipping Jesus Christ we experience his love for us as an ongoing reality each time we receive the sacraments, especially the Sacrament of the Eucharist. This is personal experience which enables us both to understand love and want to perpetually share it to others.
Let’s pray: Lord Jesus Christ, you said, “I am the living bread which came down from heaven” (John 6:48, 51). In the Last Supper you took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to your disciples, saying, “This is my body given for you, do this in memory of me” (Luk 22:19). Now we trust in you and want to do your commandment of love first of all in the Eucharist and then in the Perpetual Adoration which give us strengh to love without measure and without fears of losing all that is less than love now and forever. Amen.
Kredit foto: Ilustrasi (Ist)
