Thursday in the Fourth Week of Easter

Scripture Readings: Acts 13:13-25;  Jn 13:16-20                                   

A virus called “The Love Bug” infected millions of computers when users were lured by the promise of a heart-warming message of love. Even cautious people like software engineers were tricked into opening the attachment titled, “I love you.”

The virus revealed how deeply our hearts long for affection, how much we need expressions of love. That’s what everyone wants. So, one of the most quoted verses of Sacred Scripture is John 3:16: “God so loved the world that He sent his only begotten Son, that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” God is love. And Jesus was sent to infect us with his love.  

 

Thursday in the Fourth Week of Easter

Scripture Readings: Acts 13:13-25;  Jn 13:16-20         

On our library’s new book shelf there’s an autobiography by the mother of Dylan Klebold.  He’s one of the two boys responsible for the shootings at Columbine High School twenty years ago. She tells the story of her anguish and indescribable grief.  How could her child, the promising young man she had loved and raised, be responsible for such monstrous behavior, killing more than a dozen, wounding two dozen other students and then killing himself?  She wishes that she could have prevented it.  Twenty years later she writes, “I carry him in my heart every waking moment and in dreams when I sleep.”¹ She loved him and still loves him.  That’s why she’s suffering.

I think her pain gives us an insight into the heartbreaking experience of Jesus as he watched Judas fall away.  “The one who ate my food has raised his heel against me.”  Even at the moment of betrayal Jesus expresses his love: “Friend, why have your come? … Judas, would you betray the Son of Man with a kiss?”  The Lord loves what he has made, and suffers when we fall away. 

Since the devastating massacre at Columbine High School, there have been more than 230 school shootings, almost one a month.  Dylan’s mother wrote her story hoping to prevent more suffering like her own, and that of her troubled son.  Isn’t that also why we have the Gospels? They tell the story about the love of Jesus doing all he can to save us from falling away and bring us to eternal life.  We never tire of hearing about Jesus’ love for us, trying to save us even from ourselves.    

1. Sue Klebold, A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy, Broadway Books, 2016.