Empowered by Love

Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Eastertide

By this time most of us have laid aside the festive mood of Easter and lost ourselves once more in the daily tasks of making a living and simply surviving in a complex and competitive world. But the liturgy insists on our returning into the presence of the risen Christ until the full 50 days have run their course. More than that, the readings bring us back not only to the resurrection but to the issue of the death of Jesus, reminding us that the issue is love, his death was an act of love. Lest we think of the Easter spirit as a momentary luxury, or as an event that remains forever outside of ourselves and in some measure alien, all three of the readings make it clear that the earthly glory of the risen Christ is our empowerment to overcome all the obstacles of divine love. Life can never be quite the same for any of us once we place our faith in the resurrection of Jesus. If we believe in the resurrection, our lives can be transformed.

Because of the distance of time and culture, we do not easily realize the magnitude of the obstacles that were overcome in Peter’s baptizing the family of the centurion, Cornelius. We must believe that they were at least as great as the barriers erected by racism throughout our world, and anyone who has tried to break them down knows how intransigent these barriers are. We must know too how difficult it is to accept literally in our own times Peter’s discovery that “God has no favorites.” Our historically cultivated national sense of “manifest destiny” seems so indisputably to establish our special merit and exclusive divine election over and against the peoples of the rest of the world. We have succumbed to the illusion that because our country is the last great superpower in the world, God must favor us over all other peoples. However, the revelation to Peter is as fresh and pertinent today as it was then: God has no favorites. The barriers are of our own sinful making. Indeed, God hears the cry of the poor, the oppressed, and the excluded.

However, the message that reaches us on this Sunday is not one of condemnation but one of hope. For John assures us that all the talk about transforming love is not simply a command to us to change, but the gift of empowerment; the love of which we speak is that by which God first loved us into new possibilities and new creativity. If there is talk of laying down one’s life, or of laying down one’s prejudices, or of laying down one’s special claims to wealth, status, or power over others, it is in the context of the death and resurrection of Jesus who has brought about a whole new creation with new possibilities. John’s point is that there is really a whole new beginning. What was not possible before in human relations and human community has now begun by Christ.

John’s language is so poetic and hefty, that it is all too easy to miss the compelling practical quality of his teaching. He presents the message of Jesus as startlingly simple but all the more exigent for that simplicity. Radical transformation of all human activities is possible because love is from God, because God is love.