HOMILY 6th SUNDAY OF EASTER – B
Loved by God, and Empowered by the Spirit to Live in Love
(Acts 10:25-26, 34-35, 44-48; 1 Jn 4:7-10; Jn 15:9-17)
********************************************************
Recently, a mental health coordinator in another province asked me to conduct a workshop for her community workers on how to stay healthy and sane in a stressful time.
As I subsequently prayed with today’s readings, it struck me they contained the elements of an answer to her request, and the content of such a workshop – believe how loved we are by God, remain in that love, and love others as Jesus has loved us by the power of the Holy Spirit.
St. John, in the second reading, lays out the groundwork for us beautifully and forcefully. Love comes from God who is love. That love has been revealed by Jesus who was sent as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. For St. John, it is not either/or, but rather both/and. Jesus did come to atone for our sins, but primarily that sacrificial act on his part was to reveal the depth of the Father’s love for all humanity.
What the death of Jesus on the cross revealed was a God who is humility, mercy, compassion, unconditional love, endless forgiveness, and above all, total non-violence.
In the gospel, Jesus fleshes that out even more. God is love, and we know that love is relational, a family, a divine dance of loving energy or perichoresis. The Father is the Lover; the Son the Beloved, and the Holy Spirit the bond of love between the Father and the Son.
Because Jesus has loved us with the Father’s love, we are now to keep his commandments to love, which I like to summarize as: love God with our whole being; love others as we love ourself; love one another as he has loved us, which is sacrificial love, and above all, love our enemies by forgiving them from the heart.
Doing this makes us friends of Jesus, who has shared with us all that he has learned from the Father. Giving our lives away as he did is also the source of joy, the very joy he is experiencing in his relationship with the Father. He has chosen us to be his friends, and also to be sent out on a mission to share his love with the world. Put simply, the love that has come to us, must now flow through us to others, if it is truly love. This is how we can best “remain” in Jesus’ love.
St. Peter, in the first reading from Acts, echoes what Jesus teaches us in the gospel. We are to “love God and do what is right,” which means believing that God is love and then keeping the commandments of Jesus to love others.
Here St. John and St. Peter converge by including the Holy Spirit. Even as Peter was speaking the Word to those gathered in the home of Cornelius, the Holy Spirit came upon them and they spoke in tongues. For his part, St. John encourages us to “live through him” which indirectly means to live in the Spirit of Jesus. That is what Jesus empowered us to do when he breathed the Holy Spirit on the apostles in the Upper Room and sent them out as the Father had sent him, with the power to forgive sins and bring the new life of Easter into the world. Surely, all of this spiritual richness provides the best way to stay sane and grounded in a rather chaotic and shifting world.
The Returning To Spirit program that has been spreading across western Canada is an example of a movement that is based on love. It teaches participants to deal with their past hurts rather than build up big stories around those wounds and carry anger through life. They learn ways to address their issues and then communicate their hurt to others with love as a way of letting go and moving on with their lives.
The Eucharist is another way of staying grounded in God’s love, as it makes present that love through Word and Sacrament. Forgiven and healed, we are then sent out to in our own turn, reveal the depth of the Father’s love, shown us by Jesus, to the world through the power of the Holy Spirit.
