In today's world, there is such an overuse of the word love that we have devalued its worth, and as a result, many of our brothers and sisters no longer understand its true meaning. In fact, sometimes that sacred word, love, is used to disguise our own sin. We say love, when in reality we mean selfishness.
What is certain is that authentic love has a necessary attribute, and that attribute is truth. Edith Stein, who became St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, once wrote: "never truth without love, nor love without truth. One without the other becomes a destructive lie". She was right. When these two extremes, love and truth, are separated, both become very dangerous. Love without truth becomes false and is used to justify under a cloak of compassion the most deplorable crimes or acts, as is the case, for example, with abortion. On the other hand, truth without love becomes rigid, hard, icy, a transmitter of hatred and divisions.
Today the Word of God gives us two priceless insights on love and truth. The first is this: our love is the response to a first love. " In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins." In this pairing of gift and task, the first is the gift of God that precedes us: only after receiving it, are we called to respond. First, we are loved and only then can we also love. This also means that there is an order, a hierarchy in true love, which flows from God who is love, and therefore, also truth. As Pope Benedict XVI masterfully explained in his famous speech in Regensburg, the same St. John who told us today in the second reading that God is love, writes in the Prologue of his Gospel that God is Logos, that is, Word, Reason, Truth. Our love is a limited, human love. God's love is uncreated, infinite, eternal, full. That is to say, our love is true only when it participates in God's own love.
There is a second matter to consider today from this Sunday's readings. Since we are creatures from the hand of that God who is truth and love, and since truth and love always go hand in hand, only that love which is obedient to the truth of God is authentic. The Lord himself has expressed it: "if you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love".
God's commandments are not heavy and burdensome as the world and the devil would have us believe. They are not because God's commandment is love: "This I command you: love one another.” We do not obey as slaves, but as children who freely love their Father and trust Him. We only remain in God's love when we build on his truth. As Catholics, we know well where to find that truth: in the Revelation contained in the written Word of God and in Sacred Tradition which is authentically interpreted by the universal Magisterium of the Church.
Conscience is only a binding norm for moral action when, as St. Peter said in the first reading, it is upright: " whoever fears him and acts uprightly is acceptable to him.” We cannot fall into the trap of those who ask us to sacrifice the truth of faith in order to be understanding, pastoral, compassionate and good. It is a trap because there is no love outside the truth. Outside the truth there is only pride, lies and death.
Let us ask the Lord, in this Holy Mass, to make us humbly accept and joyfully live the truth that God has revealed to us for our salvation and that we have received in the Deposit of Faith. May that truth set us free so that we may freely love God who first loved us. May obedience to the teaching of our Mother the Church be for us a luminous way of life and may we experience our greatest joy in being good and faithful friends of God: "You are my friends, if you do what I command you."
May the Sunday Mass always be for us the encounter with our best friend and the renewal of our covenant of love with him, and with his grace, may we commit ourselves to live all that he has commanded us so that his joy may be in us in this life, and become a complete joy in the joys of Paradise.