Idolatry still exists today. It even exists among Christians. Idolatry happens when you make anything other than the Gospel of Jesus Christ the basis of your life.
Politics is a great example: you don’t evaluate Church teaching on the basis of an ideology or political program be it of the right or of the left. Rather, as Catholics, we evaluate politics through the lens of Church teaching, properly understood and appropriated. When you do this in a serious way (as opposed to the superficial manner used by various individuals and groups with agendas), you find that there is no political party you can support as a Catholic without serious misgivings. To secular-minded people, both conservative and liberal, Catholics might seem a bit politically incoherent.
The criterion set forth by the Gospel is love. The Greek word for love in our Gospel today is agape. Agape is self-giving/self-sacrificing love. Agape love is putting the good of the other before your own. As Jesus indicates in our Gospel, taken from Saint John’s Last Supper Discourse, we need to be reminded to love in a self-giving way. So, he sent the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is way Christ remains present among, in, and through us until he comes again. Being loving always requires discernment on how best to love in a given situation. Discernment requires reliance on the Holy Spirit. The ability to rely on the Holy Spirit is something that happens through prayer, fasting, and experience, even when your experience is that of failing to love.
Paul and Barnabas in Lystra, by Nicolaes Berchem, 1650
By what power do you think Paul healed the lame man in our first reading? He healed him by the same power that brought Jesus back from the dead. What is that power if not the power of love, of agape?
In the Act of Contrition, which we say between confessing our sins and receiving absolution, we admit that “in choosing to do wrong and failing to do good I have sinned against [God], whom I should love above all things.” Sin does not consist of breaking rules. Such a view of sin is simply not Christian. In fact, one might say such a perspective is idolatrous- the worship of rules. Something at which Jesus often took aim and of which he was very critical. Sin then, as the Act of Contrition indicates, is a failure to love God and/or neighbor.
This is verified when, looking back in the Gospel of John, to part of the passage that constituted our Gospel reading yesterday, one sees the commandment to which Jesus refers in our Gospel this evening, which comes from the very next chapter of John: “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.”1 This and nothing else is how we love Christ.
Looking deeper into the Johannine corpus, which is the Gospel According to Saint John and the first, second, and third letters of John, we learn:
If anyone says, “I love God,” but hates his brother, he is a liar; for whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. This is the commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother2
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