This reflection was written to explore, to renew, and to re-commit my life as a member of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem in light of the liturgical memorial of St. John the Apostle and Evangelist (whose feast is celebrated by the Latin Church today. It’s also published on one of the Facebook groups of the Order.
The opening collect for the liturgical memorial of St. John the Apostle and Evangelist reads:
O God, who through the blessed Apostle John have unlocked for us the secrets of your Word: Grant, we pray, that we may grasp with proper understanding what he has so marvelously brought to our ears.
The Church’s prayer elicits for me two things: 1.) am I a protagonist in sharing Divine Revelation and Tradition with those in the Church and with those who have fallen away from the practice of Catholic faith, and 2.) has my understanding of the Good News taken firm root in myself so as to be a witness to the noble ideal that the Grand Master spoke of in the Jerusalem Cross (October 2021)?
The Apostle who is called the Beloved Disciple knew so well, Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation; as God-Man Jesus is love par excellence. The image of John resting on the breast of Jesus comes to mind. But how does that image impact me? Benedict XVI told us St. John’s work was to demonstrate that “the essential constituent of God is love and hence, that all God’s activity is born from love and impressed with love: all that God does, he does out of love and with love, even if we are not always immediately able to understand that this is love, true love” (Audience, 9 August 2006).
In the same audience the emeritus Pontiff said the “precept to which John refers, Jesus presents his own Person as the reason for and norm of our love: ‘as I have loved you.’ It is in this way that love becomes truly Christian: both in the sense that it must be directed to all without distinction, and above all since it must be carried through to its extreme consequences, having no other bounds than being boundless.”
The feast of St. John the Apostle ought to be one of the points of our reflection today to renew our commitment to know and to live more abundantly a life of conversion, vocation, and mission as knights and dames of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre. The Apostle teaches us to be in love, to act in love, and to be missionary of Love.
Cardinal Filoni wrote in the spirit of “as I have loved you.”: “As an Order that has a constitutive commitment to the Holy Land, we must ceaselessly re-evoke the two aspects of our commitment: the ecclesiological dimension of our work, which delineates the horizon of the commitment itself, and the personal spiritual and charitable dimension, which renders us the protagonists of our work which is never mediocre or mechanical.”
In Thomas à Kempis’ famous late Middle Ages book, The Imitation of Christ, wrote:
“The love of Jesus is noble and generous: it spurs us on to do great things, and excites us to desire always that which is most perfect. Love will tend upwards and is not to be detained by things beneath. Love will be at liberty and free from all worldly affections… for love proceeds from God and cannot rest but in God above all things created. The lover flies, runs and rejoices, he is free and not held. He gives all for all and has all in all, because he rests in one sovereign good above all, from whom all good flows and proceeds” (Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Book III, Chapter V, 3-4).
A fun fact for today’s feast: we bless wine on the feast of St. John the Apostle. The blessing of wine is sign of God’s love for us.
Happy Christmas and Happy Feast.