Vine and Branches: Bishop O'Connell's Message for the 5th Sunday of Easter

There’s an old saying that you probably have heard or even said many times: “Don’t tell me that you love me…show me.”

I thought of that phrase when I read the second reading from the First Letter of John for the Fifth Sunday of Easter where the author writes, “let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth.”

Different words that make the same point as the old saying!  Our love must be real.  It isn’t enough, as they say, to “talk the talk.” We have to “walk the walk in Christ” by following the path he trod and by staying with it.

“Remain in me,” Jesus says in John’s Gospel “as I remain in you.” We know, in faith, that God is always present to us, especially in the Eucharist.  But we have to ask ourselves, in light of John’s Gospel passage, “Are we always present to him?

In the Eucharist, we “always” experience the “presence of Christ.”  In the Eucharist, we are “always” given the opportunity to “remain in him” as he “remains in and with us.”

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