Forty-Fourth Annual Time of Prayer and Fasting for
The Truth of Gospel Nonviolence
July 1-August 9
Our Lamb has conquered. Him let us follow.
FAST FOOD 2026, Twentieth Helping
Why is it in the Mass and so many Christian writings, prayers and sermons that it continues to be said that Christians are to love? Wherever you go today, if you walk into a Christian venue of some sort, you hear or see the exhortation that to love or to love your neighbor is what the Christian should do. All the Churches—Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox— seem to be singing in sync with Dionne Warwick, “What the world needs now is love, sweet love, it’s the only thing there’s just too little of.”
But what is love? What is its meaning? What is its content? What does it look like? What, if anything, does it ask or call forth from people? What does it give to people? John Lennon in probably his most famous song, Love, gave his answer to these questions:
Love is feeling, feeling love
Love is wanting to be loved
Love is you, you and me
Love is knowing we can be.
Love is touch, touch is love
Love is reaching, reaching love
Love is asking to be loved.”.
I can attest from personal experience and observation of human beings that what Dionne and John are saying are quite valid descriptions of love, or more accurately, of a type of experience the English language and other languages name love or the equivalent of love in their particular oral and script nomenclature. The word love in English and in some other languages can mean an indefinite number of things and have indefinite number of meanings, which anyone can say he or she is choosing with any act, as some have said even about dropping the atomic bombs on Japan and other small and large atrocities. “We did it out of love.” “We did it in love.”
Whereas Jesus says in His New Commandment, the only commandment that is exclusively His, “Love one another as I have loved you, you should love one another.” This imparts a specific content to the love He is proclaiming. Leave out the “as I have loved” in communicating Jesus’ love commandment and you have opened the door wide to an indeterminate number of interpretations of what Jesus means by love and what Christian authors and homilists, preachers and teachers mean by love when they speak about it.
But, if a person is speaking of the love in the Gospels, Jesus’ love, the love that saves and heals, conquers evil and death, moves humanity toward Eternal Life with God who is love, then, “as I have loved,” is the sine qua non that separates the love of the Gospels, Jesus’ love, from all other types of love.
The word love not explicitly or implicitly filtered through Jesus’ New Commandment, “as I have loved,” is vague, negligent and destructive Christian spiritual and moral guidance. “As I have loved,” as a modifying phrase for the word love, requires and limits the love being presented to a love imitative of, modeled on and logically consistent with the love lived and proclaimed by the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels when He walked on earth.
An example of but one horrifying historical example of what happens when Christians are nurtured in the word love as the command of Jesus without being thoroughly and constantly informed of its modifying phrase, “as I have love you, “ is the following: see how Christians from popes, to cardinals, to bishops, to priests, to ministers, to pastors have for 1700 years twisted and contorted Jesus’ words, “Love your enemies,” to justify up to this day, Christian brutality and butchery in every form imaginable towards Christian and non-Christians alike.
Love in, “Love you enemies,” must be as Jesus loved His enemies or else it is not Christian love. So also, it must be that in every act in which a Christian chooses to engage. Love without that content is not the love of discipleship. It is not the love for which the Christian was chosen and Baptized to live and to spread, because it makes visible the presence and power of God in history.
-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
www.emmanuelcharlesmccarthy.org
(John Lennon’s famous song, Love:
Love is real, real is love
Love is feeling, feeling love
Love is wanting to be loved
Love is you, you and me
Love is knowing we can be
https://www.youtube.com/@emmanuelcharlesmccarthy3292
“Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Love.
Heaven and earth are full of Your glory!
Hosanna in the highest!
Blessed is He, Who comes in the Name of the Lord.
Hosanna in the highest!”
