Year B / Eastertide / Sixth Sunday
Readings: Acts 10.25-26, 34-35, 44-48 / Psalm 97.1, 2-3ab, 3dc-4 (R/v cf 2b) / 1 John 4.7-10 / John 15.9-17
Once there was a monastery on a mountain. People called it the Light on the Hill because they saw how God’s love was alive amongst the monks and in how they welcomed everyone.
Over time, the monastery’s fame made the monks proud, arrogant, and self-centered. They forgot they entered the monastery to be with God, to remain with God, and to pray with God for the world. Many monks left because they no longer experienced God’s love in the midst. The people lost hope in the monks. The light of the monastery dimmed. No one joined them.
The six monks remaining monks grew old, depressed and bitter in their relationship with one another. The Abbot worried. He had to do something. He climbed down the 1001 steps to the woods below to consult a hermit renown for his holiness. The hermit listened to the abbot. Then, the hermit said: “I have no advice. The only thing I can tell you is that the Messiah is one of you.”
The puzzled abbot climbed the 1001 steps back up to the monastery. At the gate, he met Bro Mark. “Are you the Messiah, Bro Mark? You pray all the time?” “No, no. I am not. It must be Bro Issac, the infirmarian. He heals the sick”. Bro Mark asked Bro Isaac if he was the Messiah. Bro Issac said “no” and pointed him to Bro Joseph was always ready to help. Bro Joseph, in turn, went to Bro Gabriel, their best preacher. “You must be the Messiah amongst us because we hear God in your voice!” Bro Gabriel laugh the loudest laugh and pointed to the Abbot, “He must be because he leads us”.
Each of the monks kept denying they were the Messiah. Yet each one, knowing how God comes disguised in the simple and ordinary, kept on looking out for the Messiah in their midst.
From that day onwards the monks treated one another with greater respect and humility, knowing that they might in fact be speaking to Jesus. They began to show more love for one another. Their common life became more brotherly and their common prayer more fervent. Slowly people began to notice a new spirit in the monastery. They began coming back for retreats and spiritual direction. Word began to spread about the change. Men began to join the monastery.
All saw and experienced God’s love in the life the monks shared. Slowly the light returned to the monastery on the mountain. All this because the hermit drew their attention to this simple truth: Jesus lives amidst us all.
This is one of my favourite stories. It offers us wisdom to live the Christian life well. Simply put, it is a story about how these monks, and you and I, can live our lives in God’s love, with God’s love and share God’s love with all. Whether we are lukewarm in our Christian living now, or devout and fervent now, this story gives us an example of how today’s readings can be lived in our everyday life.
In today’s gospel reading, Jesus commands his disciples – and you and me – to remain in his love and to love one another. They are really one command: that we remain in Jesus’ love so that we can love others, as he loves.
Only when we have the love of Jesus and make it our own way of loving can you and I lay down our lives for others. I think we all struggle to lay down our lives, like Jesus did. We struggle because we want this action we make to mean something to God. We think it does when it is as painful, as humiliating, as tragic as Jesus. Otherwise our actions mean nothing to God.
But I believe God is asking us die on the simpler crosses in our everyday lives. Here is where we will find salvation by living more like Jesus in the world.
To die on the cross of gossip that others nail us to. On this cross, we can die to our pain and anger by forgiving those gossipers.
To die on the cross of shame. On this cross, we can die to our failures by letting family, friends and colleagues care and support us still.
To die to the cross of loveless family relationships. On this cross, we can die to our hardheartedness by learning to value every family member.
To die on the cross of broken friendships. On this cross, we can die to our selfishness to reconcile and become better friends.
To die on the cross of our addiction to excesses, to lust, or to hatred. On this cross, we can die to our sinfulness by giving God control of our lives and save us.
Yes, to die like the monks did to their small minded ways, and so opened their hearts wide to the truth that God is with them and amongst them.
These are some ways we can lay down our lives for others and for God in our everyday lives.
By laying down his life so that others can live, Jesus reveals how God’s love saves and is for everyone. Jesus could lay down his life because he understood how God’s great love is already in him and empowering him to love others. Are you and I aware of God’s great love in our lives and at work in us for others?
Today Jesus reminds us that God is also dwelling in our hearts through Jesus, that he is one with us in Jesus, and that with Jesus, his love is indeed our love for the world. This is why we are called “Beloved” in today’s second reading: we share in God’s love. All who know God know God is love. And since we are “begotten by God”, we exist to love. If we refuse to love, we reject not only God but the very life we have for didn’t God so loved the world that he gave as his only Son, Jesus, that we might live?
Yes, to be human is to love. Jesus showed us how: by loving God and loving neighbour. Do we love like Jesus? Do those around us experience God’s love through us?
“Remain in my love,” Jesus says. Oftentimes the word “remain” means “stay put” for many of us. For Jesus, to “remain” means to be one with him in God’s love so that with him we can embrace all who God will entrusts into our care and love.
Haven’t we experienced this when we said “yes” to Jesus? Yes, to forgiving family members and friends that reconciled us with the larger family and more friends. Yes, to caring for the nameless poor and faceless needy that we now know by name and history. And yes, even to reaching out to one another in our parish as friends, not strangers.
We can do this when we remain in Jesus’ love because his love empowers us to call everyone “friend”. Call them “friend”, even our enemies, because through each of them who we see, we hear, and we touch, we experience nothing less than the love of Jesus in our midst. I think this was how the monks in the story found the light of God’s love again amongst them. They could because what they really heard in the hermit’s words Jesus’ command: “love one another”.
Today we hear this same command: “love one another”. So, let us love. Let us love one another. Let us love one another as Jesus loves us. This is how we remember, celebrate and believe that the Messiah, the risen Jesus, our Lord and our God, lives amongst us always.
Preached at Church of the Transfiguration, Singapore
photo: still from the film the great silence (www.internetmonk.com)
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