Fifth Sunday of Easter,
Penelope Bridges
Alleluia, Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.
As so often happens in Easter season, we are reading our Scripture backwards today. The first reading, from Acts, comes well after both the resurrection and the revelation of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The second reading, from the Revelation to John was probably written many years after the events recounted in Acts. And the Gospel reading from John is set on the night before Jesus was arrested and crucified, ie Maundy Thursday. It can be hard and confusing to sort out the context of our readings when we just hear a small, isolated passage each Sunday. All the more reason to read your Bible, reading a whole book at a time, knowing where each of these stories fits in to the great arc of the story of Salvation.
The Gospel begins, “When Judas had gone out …”. The verses before this tell us that Jesus predicted his betrayal and indicated that the betrayer would be the one who received a piece of bread from his hand (do you hear a Eucharistic echo here, and do you appreciate the irony?). After receiving the bread from Jesus, Judas left the company, going out to do the dark work of an enemy informant. And then, John tells us, it was night. The countdown to the final confrontation has begun; the darkness is looming. We are reminded of the very beginning of John’s Gospel, where the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not overwhelm it. But now, it is dark.
This Gospel passage is the beginning of the long farewell discourse that Jesus offers his disciples before he is taken from them. It follows the story of Jesus washing the feet of his friends, where he asks them “Do you know what I have done for you?” So, when he says they are to love each other as he loves them, they have just witnessed a powerful example of his love for them, and this is what he means. Love each other as family: care for each other with gentleness; serve each other with humility.
With these words, Jesus is preparing his friends for the difficult time ahead. They are afraid now, and they will be more afraid. When he is taken, they will be leaderless. When he is killed, they will be devastated. Jesus wants to emphasize that no matter what the pressures are, no matter how terrible things get, they must hold together, because there is work to do, even after he is gone. They must continue to love each other, selflessly, sacrificially, unconditionally. They are facing a time of testing, of uncertainty, of persecution. They are going to need each other, in order to love the world as God loves it, in spite of all that the world might do to them.
By commanding his followers to love one another, Jesus isn’t talking about a feeling. After all, we know it’s impossible to command someone to have a feeling. He is talking about a way of behaving. It sounds so easy, so simple: just love one another. But as we have seen throughout Christian history, it isn’t simple at all. People have tortured others to death under the heading of loving them. And sometimes loving each other in a faith community can become twisted into an insular, exclusive dynamic, that is hard for newcomers or outsiders to penetrate. We get it wrong again and again and again.
How will people know we are his disciples? By witnessing how we treat each other and our neighbors. By seeing how closely we adhere to truth. By noticing how our activities bring people together instead of driving them apart. A community that is genuinely loving is contagious.
What actions might we take to tell the world that we are followers of Jesus? Truth telling, generosity, service, concern for the greater good and especially for those who have less than we do – less money, less voice, less status, less power.
Let’s turn to the Acts story for a moment. Peter has been brought before the church council in Jerusalem to explain himself. He has dared to baptize Gentiles, ie non-Jews – a big departure from the initial understanding of the church as a subset of Judaism. It was at first unthinkable that the Gentiles might be included in the good news of salvation through Christ.
Peter approaches the difficult confrontation, not by presenting an argument, but by telling a story, the story of how he was called to let go of notions of clean and unclean, insider and outsider. It’s a story we the readers have already heard in the voice of the narrator, and it will be referred to again later in Acts. That repetition tells us how important it is in the context of the early development of the church.
Telling stories was the way Jesus got his message across in the face of resistance. Telling our stories is sacred and revealing work. Peter allows himself to be vulnerable as he shares his own story of transformation; and that is powerful.
This idea of opening up the Gospel to Gentiles was a radical change for the disciples: God surprised them with the breadth of the invitation to follow Jesus. God is constantly surprising us in similar ways, and it’s up to us to respond positively to the surprises and enable the vision of God’s kingdom to continually push past old boundaries and reach all people.
Over the years and centuries the church has responded in varying ways to our surprising God. The Episcopal Church, while far from perfect, has taken one step after another, growing in understanding of the full humanity and worth of people of color, women, and LGBT persons. We understand that every human being is a child of God, fully entitled to dignity and opportunities for growth in Christ.
That’s not to say that it’s always easy to push those boundaries back.
This week Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe made the difficult decision to end the arrangement whereby Episcopal Migration Ministries receives significant grants from the federal government. The government had indicated that, as a condition of its funding, EMM was expected to assist in the resettlement of individuals coming from South Africa. Bishop Rowe made this decision based on conscience, deeply troubled by the preferential treatment given to these immigrants versus people fleeing war, terrorism, famine, and religious persecution who had stood patiently in line for years, some even for decades.
It was the right thing to do. Episcopal Migration Ministries will, for now, lose a great deal of a ministry that we are all rightly proud of. But the ministry will continue in other ways, and it will not be beholden to an administration that appears to have abandoned any pretense to Judeo-Christian values. Bishop Rowe’s action is a public witness to Jesus’ teaching: that we are to prioritize the needs of the last, the lost, and the least. This is how we show the world that we are Christians.
The writer of the Revelation to John had a vision of a whole new creation. “I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes.’”
The vision of Revelation feels less surreal than usual in our time and place, a time of dark news, deliberate cruelty, crude power grabs, terrorizing uncertainty, and a doubling down on the oppression of the most vulnerable. We feel beleaguered. We desperately need to hear the good news of the Gospel and Revelation that God will bring God’s Kingdom to earth. And the power of Easter is that we have seen God’s promises fulfilled, in the defeat of death by Jesus. If the words of Scripture are trustworthy and true, then all things are indeed possible with God, and we can live in joyful hope that in God’s good time, all things will be made new.
Alleluia, Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.
