Monday Fifth Week of Easter

Readings: Acts 14:-18; Ps 115:1-4.15-16; John 14:21-26

In our first reading, taken from Acts, the witness of Paul and Barnabas is irrepressible. Despite the threat of violence against them, they could not help but continue to proclaim the good news to others. Our reading also puts an aspect of early Christianity into bold relief: that the good news spread more easily in cities than in the countryside. In fact, it was in the countryside of the ancient Roman Empire that paganism maintained a stronghold for a number of centuries. It was in the urban centers of the ancient empire that the early Church took root and began to flourish.

What is interesting to note in this reading is that even after Paul and Barnabas tell the villagers emphatically they are not Zeus and Hermes, the people of the village remain determined to make a sacrifice to them. It is also important to point out that even after the miraculous healing Paul accomplished, the villagers were not converted en masse. I think this demonstrates how ineffectual miracles usually are in bringing people to faith.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, in his sublime novel, The Brothers Karmazov asserted:

miracles are never a stumbling-block to the realist…The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact… Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith¹

Of course, the villagers in our reading from Acts are not modern skeptical realists. They are ancient, rural pagans. But like the modern realist and, indeed, all human beings, they labor under their preconceptions. Our preconceptions bound what we conceive as possible, desirable, right and proper. A preconception, you might say, is a conceptual rut in which you are stuck. Christians are certainly not exempt from having preconceptions. Many of these preconceptions hamper and handicap our mission to evangelize, impeding the spread of the Good News.

Perhaps nothing brings the preconceptions of many Christians to the fore like Jesus’s insistence in today’s Gospel on keeping his commandments. When it comes to commandment-keeping, our tendency is almost always to start making lists of things we must not do and things we must do. In all honesty, many of us never make it to the list of things we must do because we become so caught up in all the proscriptions, all the perceived prohibitions. This turns the good news in to the great "NO!"

Priest of Zeus Sacrificing to Saint Paul, by Raphael

Strict adherence to what many people mistakenly believe to be the checklist of holiness, results in a gloomy, stern, self-righteousness that is devoid of the Spirit. Instead of life-giving, it is soul-sucking. Such an approach smacks of the very thing Jesus constantly challenged and rebuked during his public ministry. For people who practice and advocate for this, the Lord becomes one who enslaves instead of the one who sets us free. In his Letter to the Galatians, Saint Paul exhorts concerning this rule-bound view of discipleship: “For freedom Christ set us free; so stand firm and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery.”²

In what, then, does keeping Jesus’s commandments consist? In the chapter before the one from which our Gospel reading for today is taken, which is also from John’s Last Supper Discourse, the Lord says to his disciples:

I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another. This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another³

In response to Judas’s question about God revealing himself only to the chosen few, Jesus says that the Father will dwell in the one who keeps his commandment: the commandment to love. And so, it is by loving others as Jesus loves us, which is not easy, that God is revealed and Jesus is made present. This sounds lovely. But in the nitty-gritty of life, loving others as God loves us through Christ is very hard.

How do we love others? By forgiving those who’ve trespassed against us. By loving and praying for our enemies. Remember, an enemy is someone who actively opposes you, someone who is hostile toward you, speaks of ill of you, seeks ways to “get” you, plots your demise, etc. In other words, someone who, for whatever reason(s), gives you a hard time and who often seeks to make your life miserable. It’s important to briefly note that there is a difference between bearing a wound and bearing a grudge. Love is what prevents wounds from turning into grudges.

Our challenge as followers of Jesus, who died and rose for love of us, is to make ourselves neighbors and not enemies. To be a Christian, your neighborliness must extend even to your enemies. Talk about overcoming a preconception! In Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, Jesus himself teaches:

if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same?⁴

Our unwillingness to live in this new way puts us in a far worse state than than the well-meaning pagans who wanted to sacrifice oxen to Paul and Barnabas.

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1 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Book I, Chapter 5, “The Elders.”^↩
2 Galatians 5:1.^↩
3 John 13:34-35.^↩
4 Matthew 5:46-47.^↩