Homily for 6th Sunday of Easter

Homily for the
6th Sunday of Easter

April 30, 1989

John 14: 23-29
Acts 15: 1-2, 22-29
St. Theresa, Bronx

“Anyone who loves me will be true to my word” (John 14: 23).

When Jesus speaks of his “word,” he means his teaching, which he summarized in last Sunday’s gospel:  “This is how all will know you for my disciples:  your love for one another” (John 13: 35).

But the “word” of Jesus, our love for one another, always has to be specified.  You may remember Lucy Van Pelt telling her brother Linus that she loved mankind; it was people she couldn’t stand.  St. John Bosco advised his Salesians to love their pupils because love is the key that unlocks hearts.  But, he continued, it isn’t enuf to love them.  They must know they are loved.  They have to be told.  Even more, they have to be shown.

Our own experience confirms the need to specify love, i.e., to make it real thru specific deeds.  Telling a friend or a spouse, “I love you” isn’t enuf.  We have to help or comfort or remember or just be with our beloved, according to her or his needs.

The Seven Works of Mercy, by Caravaggio

We see concrete and specific love in the Acts of the Apostles.  In the 1st place, the Church leaders who gather at Jerusalem show their love for the Church by their sensitivity to the culture and the feelings of non-Jewish Christians.  The 1st great crisis of the Church was this question:  Could only Jews accept Jesus as the Christ and thus be saved?  In other words, did a Gentile have to become a Jew in order to become a Christian?  Becoming a Jew meant not only circumcision for the male converts, but dietary rules, liturgical rules, a total of over 600 specific commandments that the rabbis found in the Law of Moses.

The council of Jerusalem and the whole Jerusalem church, guided by the Holy Spirit, showed their love for others by not imposing all these restrictions on people who came from such a vastly different background.  Belief in Jesus as the Messiah was enuf to unite Gentile and Jew in a common faith.

Even so, the Church leaders did command certain actions.  They told the Gentile Christians that they would “be well advised to avoid” idolatry, blood, and unchastity (Acts 15:29).  Obviously, one could not worship the one true God, and idols as well.  Avoiding blood and the meat of strangled animals, i.e., meat with the blood still in it, meant respecting God’s power over life; for the ancients viewed blood as the vehicle of life.  The “life’s blood,” we say.  Avoiding unchastity, illicit sexual union, meant a respect for the sacredness of sex, for family, for the dignity of the human person.  So the 3 essentials commanded are 3 concrete expressions of love for God and for neighbor.  “Anyone who loves me will be true to my word:  love on another.”

Jesus makes a promise to go along with that saying, that command:  “Anyone who loves me will be true to my word, and my Father will love him; we will come to him and make our dwelling place with him always” (John 14:23).  That is a promise of eternal life.