FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER (2025)

FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER (2025)

Readings:

Acts of the Apostles 14:21-27

Psalms 145:8-13

Revelation 21:1-5a

John 13:31-33a, 34-35

As a result of Pentecost, the early church had a compulsion to preach the gospel to the ends of the known earth.  Our readings from the Acts of the Apostles show the apostles and the disciples as very peripatetic, walking from city to city, preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ.  This Sunday we see the same ‘stars’ as last weekend’s first reading, Paul and Barnabas, returning to cities where they had already established small communities of faith, and so the cities would feel safer for them.  They were coming from places of great resistance to their message, cities from which they were expelled or even stoned.  When they were reunited with communities they already knew, Acts tells us that they “strengthened the spirits of the disciples and exhorted them to persevere in the faith, saying ‘It is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the kingdom of God.’”

When they, Paul and Barnabas, were finished encouraging their familiar communities, they traveled on to new places “proclaiming the Word” there; they even sailed to Antioch, making sure that wherever they preached, people knew that God “had opened the door of faith to the Gentiles.”  And so the church grew, and grew into the 1.41 billion people worldwide that we have today.  The huge church, of which we are a part, started with an itinerant preacher from Nazareth, who was proven to be God’s Son, and who gathered around Him a following that would not only include the people of His choosing (apostles), but it would also include others who were commissioned to preach His gospel.  The beginning of the Church was filled with many difficulties and perils, and the Church, and those who governed it, were not always on their best behavior.  Indeed, some in every age, were a scandal to the Church, and to the people of God.

Yet, the Church persevered through thick and thin.  The Devil who tempted Jesus on the mountain before His public ministry began, has never prevailed in erasing the powerful and strong faith that ordinary men and women have in Jesus, the Christ.  Why has that faith survived?  The faith is solidly based on the Scriptural evidence that we celebrate during this marvelous Easter season, that Jesus overcame sin and death by His own bloody death on a cross, and opened wide the gates of heaven so that everyone, everyone who utters the name of Jesus, even through a life well-lived, can inherit the undeserved gift of eternal life.  Indeed, as our second reading states, God “has [made] all things new.”

In the gospel, on the night before He would die, Jesus had one essential teaching to share with His disciples, one piece of advice for a surefire way to be with Him in heaven: “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 another.”  This was no lengthy Encyclical, this was no complicated doctrinal discourse, it was simple and to-the point advice, and it was a distillation of everything Jesus had said and done during His brief public ministry.  His actions truly did speak louder than His words, and the disciples should have no questions about who Jesus expects them to be.  Indeed, we should have no questions about who Jesus expects us to be.

In our divided world, there are wars and insurrections, there is cruelty towards those who are not like us, there are divisions sown for the sole purpose of keeping us apart, and so much of it is foolishly done in the name of religion, Christianity in particular.  I think it is clear from Jesus’ last words to His disciples that rounding up people, providing them with no due process, and sending them off to a foreign gulag, is not the Christian way.  We must take to heart Jesus’ last words to His disciples, for if what we are doing is not about love, then we have failed to become the people Jesus wants us to be.