In the First Reading today we have the account of the first Gentile convert to Christianity, that of Cornelius the Centurion. Cornelius had a vision of an Angel who told him that his good deeds had been recognised by God and that he should send his men to bring Simon Peter to him. At more or less the same time Peter himself had a dream in which he saw a big sheet being let down from heaven containing many unclean animals and he was told by a voice from heaven to kill and eat them. As a well brought-up Jew Peter did not want to eat anything unclean but he was told by the voice three times that nothing made by God was unclean and to kill and eat the animals. By this he came to understand that the Word of God was intended not only for the Jews but for the Gentiles too. Peter therefore went with the men Cornelius had sent and then the events given in today’s First Reading occur. The Holy Spirit was poured out on them all and Peter baptised Cornelius and his entire household.
This is a wonderful story and it shows how the newly born Church was guided by the Holy Spirit to fulfil its mission in accordance with God’s will. The important thing being that the Church was intended for everyone in the world and not just for the Jewish people. This is something that we have to keep always before us, realising that membership of the Church can never exclude anyone who believes. It can never be confined to an exclusive group. We have to always guard ourselves from thinking that this or that person or group is unworthy of being a Christian. The Second Reading and the Gospel are all about love. St John exhorts us to place love at the very centre of our lives and to make it our main motivating force. He tells us that love originates in God and that anyone who embraces God embraces love. He also points out that when we fail to love others this actually betrays a lack of belief in God. St John says, “Anyone who fails to love can never have known God.? This really puts our belief in God to the test for it means that we can never separate our beliefs from our actions. When we discover hate in our hearts we ought to realise that we are getting into dangerous territory and that we are already putting our faith in God in jeopardy. The Gospel text is very much on the same lines with Jesus speaking to his disciples in the long discourse he gave at the Last Supper.
After telling them about the True Vine which we heard about last Sunday he moves on to tell them about how he is the expression of the Father’s love for us all. He gives us the famous command to love, “This is my commandment: love one another as I have loved you.? In Old Testament times God gave Moses the Ten Commandments for his Chosen People but these were very prescriptive and on the “do this, don’t do that? model. But here in the new dispensation all the old commandments are reduced to this one new commandment, the command to love. This new commandment actually encapsulates all the old ones but more importantly it makes it very clear the underlying principle by which God wants us to live our lives. The famous early 20th Century Catholic intellectual Hilaire Belloc fell in love with an American girl he met in a London restaurant. After a few days trying unsuccessfully to woo her, she informed him that she was leaving for America the very next day and told him that she was going to fulfil her long term wish to enter an enclosed convent on her return to California. Her rich mother wouldn’t let her join the convent until she had taken her on a tour of Europe so that she could see something of the world before taking her vows and entering the cloister. Belloc was shattered and quite beside himself with grief at the lovely girl’s departure. He was only a very young man but managed to scrape together enough to buy a passage on the next boat to New York. Without any money and just relying on his wits he managed to get himself across America. Often he offered to paint a portrait of a hotel keeper in exchange for a night’s lodgings. When Belloc eventually arrived in California he managed to track down the poor girl and to her complete astonishment turned up on her doorstep asking her to marry him. She refused again but he wouldn’t give up and in due course managed to woo her away from the convent to be his wife. This is love, this is passion; this is heroic; this is the kind of love God wants from us. In the Gospel text Jesus says to the disciples, “A man can have no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends.?
We often see these words inscribed on war memorials to mark the sacrifice of their lives given by those who have fallen in war. We acknowledge the tremendous sacrifice those soldiers were willing to make on behalf of others. And when we look around us we actually discover quite a lot of this sort of thing. We see it in the lives of parents who make huge sacrifices for their children. We see it in the lives of those who dedicate themselves to caring for a partner or a parent or a sick child. We see it in the lives of those who give up a kidney so that someone else does not have to live their lives on a dialysis machine. As humans we find that we are actually no strangers to sacrifice. In fact, we are surrounded by people, frequently without a vestige of faith, who live lives of tremendous and heroic self-sacrifice. One is led to conclude that we are made that way; that we human beings, for all our faults and failures, can in the end come up with the goods. The God who made us knows this very well. He places before us achievable goals, targets that are hittable. He knows us better than we know ourselves and the Cross he places on our shoulders is tailor-made to our own very particular specifications. This Christian enterprise is a wonderful mystery. It provides a deeply satisfying understanding of the reasons behind the existence of the whole created order. We each have our part to play. But before us is the most powerful example of Jesus Christ himself. He is the Son of God and Son of Man; the lamb and the shepherd; the priest and the victim; the creator and the saviour. So we glory in our faith and in the great God we have. We marvel at the intricacy of his workings and the mysterious hidden way that he operates in the world. And we look forward with anticipation to coming of his wonderful Kingdom at the end of time.