Year B / Eastertide / Sixth Sunday
Readings: Acts 10.25-26, 34-35, 44-48 / Psalm 98.1,2-3,3-4 (R/v cf. 2b) / 1 John 4.7-10 / John 15.9-17
He sat faraway from the house. “Boy, Boy, dinner time,” the maid called. He didn’t move. He put his head onto his folded arms and sobbed quietly. Dad had just scolded him harshly for making his younger brother cry.
Then he felt a hand around his shoulder. It drew him close into a warm, comforting embrace. “But Tee Tee kicked me first.” “I know; it’ll be ok,” she said. He leaned in, and laid his head on her chest. He felt consoled.
For many, the mother’s act is kind and caring. For the young boy, it might have been just marvellous. “Marvellous” because it is extremely good and it pleases very much, as the dictionary defines. And, who amongst us does not hope for a marvellous deed or two, now and again, in our lives from our loved ones or from those we interact with?
What about God? What could God’s marvellous deed be in our lives?
Listen to this line from our second reading: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might have life through him. We know this line well; it is the foundation of our faith in God through Jesus. We profess it each time we say the Creed. And yes, this is God’s marvellous action in our lives.
But what if God keeps doing another marvellous deed in our lives? That of knowing us, and our need to be saved, more honestly than we do.
Psalm 139 is about God who created us always searching our hearts and minds, to know our deepest most thoughts and feelings. Here is God wanting to know the stuff that you and I want God to know, like our patient longing for God in our pains and hurts, our grateful praise to God for the goodness in our lives, and even, our doubts about whether God really exists. Yes, this is how God knows that deep in our core lives a spiritual being who trusts God as best as we can in everything.
But don’t we also live lives with stuff that we don’t want God to know about: lives on the surface and in the superficial; lives of addictions and bad habits; lives that are unChristian and sinful. Yes, lives that do not do justice to the core of who we each are. God knows this ugly, greedy, dark and furtive side of our lives too. This side we try to rationalize, to blame others for, and to hide from one another, from God, and from ourselves.
Now, if God knows everything about us, everything we’ve ever done or thought, the good or the bad, so, what then?
The “what then” must be this marvellous fact: that God still wants all of us. Still wants you, no matter how often you’ve refused God’s love to turn your lives around. Still wants me, in spite of the times I have failed to live my priesthood well. Still wants each and everyone of us, irresistibly, no matter how much wrong we have done, like the executed criminals in Indonesia, or how disrespectful towards Christianity we may be like Amos Lee, or how faithful we are like a good Christian who will die tonight after a lifetime of good works.
“That God still wants all of each of us.” Hasn’t this thought kept us awake sometimes at 2 and 3 a.m., wrestling to answer this question: “How can God’s love be so merciful towards me and my habitual sinning?”
God is love and God is merciful because God values the “loveable” in you and me.
Being loveable comes from within us. There, God's grace plays artist in our lives. God’s grace creates and nurtures the beauty of who each one of us is -- God’s beloved. This beauty does not appear only in the saintly; it is also and always present in the sinful. In fact, this beauty always radiates outward from everyone of us, however holy or unholy we are. It cannot be smudged off or wiped away or criticized into disappearance because “loveableness” is God’s beauty shinning through our lives. And our “loveableness” is always good enough for Jesus to call us to remain in God’s love.
Isn’t this the mercy of God Jesus reminds us about this evening? This is why after Jesus asks us to love one another in John’s Gospel, he will ask us to allow him to wash our feet, our simple and often times flawed humanity. Do we dare let God in Jesus wash our feet? If we do so, we will give Jesus permission to help us reclaim what is loveable and loving in us. Our human ways of loving God will never perfect; but our letting God love us in Jesus will make our living with imperfections, faithful.
Sooner or later, we will all come to know that God does love us. Then, we might say, “I know God’s kind of love. I get it.” But getting it isn't the point. The truth is that we will never fully understand the height, the depth and the breadth of God’s love in our humanity.
The point we are to catch is this in Jesus' message today is this: all God wants for you and me is to remain in God's love, to have life in God. And how does Jesus convey God’s desire? By telling us this: I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy might be complete.
My joy!? When did we hear someone else say, “Your joy matters to me”? When was the last time we gave half a thought to our own joy?
Today Jesus tells us that our joy matters. And it must matter because joy is indeed the whole point of being in relationship with God. Yes, the joy of being with God! This counts most. Not responsibility. Not duty. Not accomplishment. Not even prayer or sacrifice. Just joy; God’s joy in us; God’s joy for us.
How can we have this joy? By humbling ourselves and letting our hearts be moved compassionately by one who just does not say, “I love you,” but who lives out in deed the depth of his love for us: No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
Jesus commands us to love like he did because our human tendency is to be selfish, self-serving, self-preserving. When we dare to love someone else, and to love them for their wellbeing, and not for us to feel good or be savior-like, then, we begin to give love a chance to take root, and to grow wider and deeper in our world. Then, love can save, transform and give life.
Jesus asks this of us as his disciples because this is how our lives and the world can turn away from sin and its consequences, and begin living anew. Yes, love is truly, madly, deeply true love when it is laid out there, on the crosses in our lives, for someone else to live more fully, more freely, more happily. After all, isn’t this how Jesus gave us Easter joy?
She looked down at her son. She stroked his hair as she sang him a lullaby to sleep. Then, quietly, she whispered, “I want you to be happy, baby. I love you.”
Doesn’t Jesus’ assurance of God’s love this evening remind us of how we’ve also experienced God through our mothers? Yes, marvelous, isn’t it how true love always stoops down to our level, only to lift us up, again and again, into the fullness of life and the abundance of joy?
Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
photo: wisegeek.com (Internet)
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