“I give you a new commandment,” says the Lord. “Love one another as I have loved you” (Jn 13:34). These words from this Sunday’s gospel are some of the most simple and most profound in all of scripture. They are simple enough that even a child can understand them. But we should not use their simplicity as an excuse to not ponder their profound meaning with an adult understanding of faith.
As college students across the nation prepared for their final exams and the start of summer, one 19-year old in San Diego walked into a Jewish synagogue with a rifle and opened fire, killing one woman and wounding three more.
We find a profound mix of the ordinary and extraordinary in this Sunday’s gospel. I’m not an avid fisherman, but I’ve been fishing. And I know that whenever someone passes by while you are fishing, they inevitably ask the same question: “Didja catch anything?” So there could not be a more ordinary question Jesus could have asked the Apostles when he sees them fishing in the Sea of Tiberius, also known as the Sea of Galilee.
I was sitting around the table at our campus ministry house with a group of students recently when one of them asked me a question. “I just came from class,” she said, “and our professor gave us an ethical question and I was wondering what you had to say about it.”
