A reading of the holy Gospel according to John 15:12-17
Jesus said to his disciples:“This is my commandment: love one another as I love you.No one has greater love than this,to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.You are my friends if you do what I command you.I no longer call you slaves,because a slave does not know what his master is doing.I have called you friends,because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.It was not you who chose me, but I who chose youand appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain,so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you.This I command you: love one another.”
REFLECTION
“I have called you friends”. Jesus chose you to be His friend.
The body of Christ are the actual faces in the next pew. The short or tall, the thin or the doubled chinned, the out of tune singer or the gifted cantor, the intelligent or the not so, the pious and the not so, the seeker for God and the one who is there because of obligation, the one with the past and the one with a bright future. Jesus chooses us to be His friends. All different walks of life, all sorts of problems, all weaknesses are invited to be with Him.
And why? Because He loves us and in obeying the Father’s will He took on our sins and died for us. He conquered death and offers us an eternal life with Him.
No one is left out. Do we have to do something or be someone to earn such an honor?
All He asks of us is to “say yes” to this gift. We are to follow the roadmap He has given: His commandments, to love Him through corporal and spiritual acts of mercy and to care for His Body, the Church. We are to love like Him, we are to forgive like Him.
Are we ready to be His friend?
PAPA prays for all priests. There are many priests who have requested our prayers.
And why so? Because they want to be on fire for God and to be the leaders of the Body and Bride of Christ.
The priests need to show us how to be a friend, how to sacrifice, how to give of ourselves, how to leave the materialistic world and concentrate on what is most important--our salvation. The priest is the “in persona Christi capitis in ecclesiae-In the person of Christ, the Head, in the Church." He has studied and trained to show us how to fight off the devil, how to thwart temptation, how to do combat, how to love Jesus and how to follow in His footsteps. But most of all, he brings Jesus to us during the Mass. We must pray to keep them from never forgetting their vocation.
Most important, they need to believe and share the belief that the Resurrected Christ is in the Eucharistic Host. Please join the many in PAPA to pray for our priests, PAPA Prayer for Priest. .
