Sacrificial Charity: An Act of Ironic Fittingness
Gospel Reflection for Friday May 23, 2025
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 you
and 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." John 15:12-17
If you look at the icon of St. Maximilian Kolbe, you will find an excerpt from today’s Gospel. It also happens to be the Gospel reading for his feast day on August 14th. Like so many text memes with Bible verses on them, it is easy to just pass over them quickly either out of familiarity for the verse of exasperation for its application.
However, an icon, especially an icon with Scripture, should be meditated upon for its relationship to the subject. This is especially true when the subject is not the direct Biblical character the verse refers to. What is the Church trying to teach us about this saintly figure, and how does this person teach us something unique about the transcendent truth of the Gospel passage?
There are layers of fittingness and layers of irony in this passage being used for St. Maximilian. First, he is one of the great modern martyrs of the 20th century and was called by Pope John Paul II a “martyr of charity.” He showed this great love that Christ speaks of here in laying down his life. The irony is that it was not for a “friend” in the way we think of the word, but a stranger– a fellow prisoner at Auschwitz.
These men had not known each other before their imprisonment and may not have exchanged more than five words together before that fateful day. And yet, is this not an even greater illustration of the charity that Christ calls us to in this reading? Kolbe, though barely knowing this man in the natural way one would expect to know a friend, still makes this act of love as if there were lifelong companions.
Another example of fittingness and irony is that Jesus says to his Apostles that they are no longer slaves, but friends. This verse has perhaps become so commonplace to modern readers that it does not resonate the way it should considering who is saying it. We then have another example from St. Maximilian, who considered himself a “slave of Mary” by virtue of his consecration in the spirit of St. Louis de Montfort.
Catholics know that this title is meant to imitate Mary herself, who referred to herself in a similar way in relationship to “the Lord” in Luke 1:38 (though modern translations favor the gentler phrase, “handmaiden”). Either way, it is again strange that those whom Jesus calls friends, now want to make themselves slaves. What could motivate this self-imposed servitude?
It seems charity, especially the radical charity that Christ presents by his words and actions in today’s Gospel, carries with it this paradox of strange yet also right. Christian charity should strike the world as odd but also resonate with a deeper reality that resides beneath our fallen human natures. It is the deeper unity of God that is found in the diversity of creation.
It is in the diversity of the Trinity that an even deeper unity of God’s Divine Simplicity is found. These paradoxes we do accept by faith, but they can become evident to us in the practice of charity. A practice Jesus calls us to in today’s Gospel and was lived out in our martyr of charity. St. Maximilian Kolbe, pray for us!