The love of the Sangha
This week we will be doing a commentary on the video: The Love That Jesus Commands – Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermon The original description of that video is: Friends, on this Fifth Sunday of Easter, we have an extraordinary Gospel that is at the heart of the Christian thing. Jesus, at the beginning of a lengthy and incredibly rich monologue he gives the night before he dies, says to his disciples, “I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another. This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” This is not a sentimental or psychological banality. To understand Jesus here, we have to understand what a strange thing love is—and the way the word is being used. Mass Readings:Reading 1 — Acts 14:21-27Psalm — Psalm 145:8-9, 10-11, 12-13Reading 2 — Revelation 21:1-5aGospel — John 13:31-33a, 34-35 Opening Invocation:Let us speak of love—not as a sugary indulgence, nor as an automatic virtue—but as an ethical architecture with weight-bearing beams.Let us unravel the overextension of a word that once shook empires, now diluted across cereal ads and dating apps.Let us examine the difference between liking comfort and loving in commitment.Let us seek to recover love’s lost grammar. 🧠 I. The Semantic Erosion of Love Bishop Barron opens with a lament that resonates like a bell in an abandoned temple: “We use the word ‘love’ for everything—from God to garlic bread.”
