Friday of the Fifth Week of Easter
Today's Mass Readings
“This is my commandment: love one another as I love you.”
Today’s gospel reading (John 15:12-17) seems to offer a very simple idea: love one another. When some sort of fight breaks out, or even when minor everyday arguments happen, I often hear bystanders say: “If only they would just love one another a little more.” Or – how many amateur political commentators have read stories about the Israel/Palestine conflict or other conflicts around the globe and asked, “Can’t we all just get along? If we just love each other, things would be a lot better.”
True…perhaps. Except that both of today’s readings also give testament to how very, very difficult it is to “love one another”. Jesus says in the gospel that if people love each other as he loves them, they will lay down their lives for each other. How many of us walk around on a day-to-day basis, in the midst of our everyday arguments and mini-disagreements, and think, “Let me love you. Let me lay down my life for you”? That requires humility and a certain awareness that, despite the cost to oneself (a life), the call to follow Jesus is the greater task.
And in the reading from Acts (15:22-31), we see that things have happened to disrupt the harmony of the earliest Christian communities. Look again at the end of Acts 2, and you will see there an account of the earliest Christian churches and how they dwelled in perfect peace. That peace was rather short lived, however. Quite quickly after that, and throughout the whole book of Acts and all the letters of Paul, for that matter, we see evidence that even the earliest Christian communities were filled with, well, humans acting in human ways. There were many disagreements, lots of ways in which people had their feelings hurt and their communities disrupted.
In today’s passage, the apostles send Barnabus and Silas to Christian groups who are arguing about whether they can eat meat sacrificed to idols, and what the right way is to get married. These questions relate directly to the fact that many of the new Christians joining the community were not Jewish (who would grown up knowing rules about meat and marriage), but Greek. There is a clash of cultures here, and the apostles are dealing with it the best way they know how: helping people love each other by sending good people that they know and vouch for, to deliver messages of hope and healing from the Holy Spirit and the apostles.
Will the churches listen to the words of these relative strangers and change their lives? Will they do the hard work of striving to love each other, even across cultural differences? Will they become more humble and more loving? We can hope that those earliest communities did do that. But we know that Christian communities up to our day struggle with similar questions and similar disagreements. It is hard work to love each other. Our challenge from today’s scripture is to think of those arguments that we have in our own communities, those things that prevent us from really loving others – and then to find ways to be humble and lay down our own lives for our Christian friends.
- Jana M. Bennett