Easter V 2019

M C Escher - Reptiles

​

• Acts 11:1-18  • 
• Psalm 148  • 
• Revelation 21:1-6  • 
• John 13:31-35

The Gospel for this Sunday is just seven sentences long, but they are of great importance. When people are asked to summarize the Christian faith, they often do so by referring to the two great commandments love God with all your heart, and love your neighbour as yourself. This is what Jesus is recorded as saying in three Gospels -- Matthew, Mark and Luke. Yet, to think that this adequately summarizes the Christian faith, is an important mistake.   

In these passages, Jewish scribes asked Jesus to identify the most central of the several hundred commandments -- including the dietary restrictions the reading from Acts refers to -- that were to be found in their scriptures. He picks just two – one from Deuteronomy, the other from Leviticus – and declares that everything else in the Jewish law and prophets hangs on these two commandments. He also declares that he has not come to abolish the law. However, he does not expressly say that these two commandments summarize his own faith.

---

In contrast to the other three Gospels, the Fourth Gospel does not record this episode. Rather, in the brief Gospel for this Sunday, John tells us that Jesus offered his own disciples a third, new, and ‘great’ commandment – ‘that you love one another’. As faithful Jews, the disciples commitment to love of God and neighbour could be taken for granted. To mark them out as followers of Christ, they were called to obey a third commandment -- special love for each other.
    

Augustus John - Two Disciples

Given the divisions, persecutions and mutual contempt that have so often marred the history of the Church – and still do – this third, distinctively Christian commandment has proved very much harder to live by than the other two, so hard as to be virtually impossible in fact. The judgment of history, then, seems to make the Christian faith a hopeless undertaking. Still, this Sunday’s reading from Revelation reminds us that ultimately we must place our hopes in a  world that God has promised, not in a world that human beings, however well intentioned, will make. It is God, not us, who makes all things new, and God does so in ways that human beings may well find hard to discern.  The implication is that we must wait patiently until ‘the home of God is among mortals’. Only then can we expect ‘a new heaven and a new earth’.

---