Something to think about
Jerome Murphy-O’Connor wrote in The First Letter to the Corinthians in the New Jerome Biblical Commentary that ”A Eucharistic community cannot be a true gathering in which there are the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’. In other words, Paul … clearly states that a Jesus community itself is the necessary basis for any and every celebration of the Eucharist, not vice versa. A genuine Eucharist cannot involve only a few people who communally celebrate the Eucharistic meal while the majority are present basically as onlookers. The essence of his [Paul’s] reaction is that there can be no Eucharist in a community whose members do not love one another.”
Paul himself writes of the absolute importance of love telling us that if one does not have love then one has nothing, for love is the greatest gift one can give to another. What should be emphasized here is that Paul is speaking of a specific type of love. The word
agápē is one of the four words for love found in Koine Greek. The first is
storge which brotherly love. The second is
philia which is the love between friends. The third,
eros, is romantic love, the sense of “
being in love.” And the fourth type of love is
agápē which is the love that God has for us and that we have for God.
Jesus tells us “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” [Jn 15:12-13]. This is agápē; Jesus neither equivocates nor does he offer conditions upon which we can love one but not another. He clearly and succinctly commands us to “love one another,” no if, ands, or buts.
Jesus gave us the Eucharist, the purest offering of his body and blood, as a real and substantive expression of his love for us, his gift of agápē, which we receive every time we celebrate the Eucharist. For this reason, Paul tells us that in order to receive the agápē of our Lord and Savior, we must love one another; we must exemplify and extend agápē to all of our brothers and sisters. To the extent that we limit ourselves in love for one another, we diminish our love for Jesus.
Dorothy Day once said “You only love God as much as you love the person you love the least.” Perhaps we should consider how much we love or fail to love others as a direct measure of our love for God. It is certainly something to think about.
