Sixth Sunday after Easter – Year B

May 5, 2024

Gospel Lectionary Text

John 15:9-17

15:9 As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.

15:10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love.

15:11 I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.

15:12 "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

15:13 No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends.

15:14 You are my friends if you do what I command you.

15:15 I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.

15:16 You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.

15:17 I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

Context

Welcome to the sixth Sunday after Easter, where Jesus invites us to reconsider the nature of love. The ancient Greeks categorized love into four types: “agape,” divine love, was considered the highest; the others, like “phileo,” the love of a friend, were viewed as lesser.

Throughout the Gospel of John, and particularly in this week’s passage, Jesus connects “agape” and “phileo” in a way that gets at the heart of the Gospel message. Jesus reveals something none of us — certainly not the ancient Greeks — dared to imagine: that the ultimate form of divine love (agape) is an expression of “phileo.” “No one has greater love (agape) than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends…”

Jesus reveals that God is friend, not foe; in Christ, there are no enemies — none, not one! This is the Gospel, the sacred center of the universe, the joy of Jesus that completes our joy and keeps the world spinning! As the poet Rumi said, “Start the drumbeat. Everything we have said about the Friend is true. The beauty of that peacefulness makes the whole world restless.”

Question

In what ways does seeing God as a friend bring you peace, and in what ways does it make you restless?

Reflections

Bittersweet Fruit

As I was telling David how terrible hell would be, he turned to me and said, "And what do you think this is?" He pointed to the rotten wood poles that held the rusty tin sheets that served as walls for his shack. The metal sheets had as many holes as a slice of swiss...

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No Greater Love

The ancient Greeks had four ways of talking about love. The highest, most idealized form was “agape,” which is divine love. It is the gold standard of love. The other forms of love were assumed to be lower, human or natural loves: “Storge” is the love of a parent. “Eros” is sexual or erotic love....

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The Crying Monk

We are approaching the 6th Sunday since Easter, and the circumstances of my life have seemingly all but erased the memory of the resurrection. I need a reminder of the Good News. At first glance, I’m not sure I get that from today’s text.

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Praying Eucharistically - Weekly Homily by James Alison:

Understanding the Bible anew through the Mimetic Theory of René Girard.

Poetry

Friendship
by David Whyte

is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us see ourselves through another’s eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses, as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn.

A friend knows our difficulties and shadows, and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them. An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die.

In the course of the years, a close friendship will always reveal the shadow in the other as much as ourselves; to remain friends we must know the other and their difficulties, and even their sins, and encourage the best in them, not through critique but through addressing the better part of them, the leading creative edge of their incarnation, thus subtly discouraging what makes them smaller, less generous, less of themselves.

Through the eyes of a real friendship an individual is larger than their everyday actions, and through the eyes of another we receive a greater sense of our own personhood, one we can aspire to, the one in whom they have most faith. Friendship is a moving frontier of understanding, not only of the self and the other but also of a possible and as yet unlived future.

Friendship is the great hidden transmuter of all relationships: it can transform a troubled marriage, make honourable a professional rivalry, make sense of heartbreak and unrequited love, and become the newly discovered ground for a mature parent–child relationship.

The dynamic of friendship is almost always underestimated as a constant force in human life. A diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble: of overwork, of too much emphasis on a professional identity, of forgetting who will be there when our armoured personalities run into the inevitable natural disasters and vulnerabilities found in even the most average existence.

Through the eyes of a friend we especially learn to remain at least a little interesting to others. When we flatten our personalities and lose our curiosity in the life of the world or of another, friendship loses spirit and animation. Boredom is the second great killer of friendship.

Through the natural surprises of a relationship held through the passage of years we recognise the greater surprising circles of which we are a part and the faithfulness that leads to a wider sense of revelation, independent of human relationship: to learn to be friends with the earth and the sky, with the horizon and with the seasons, even with the disappearances of winter, and in that faithfulness take the difficult path of becoming a good friend to our own going.

Friendship transcends disappearance: an enduring friendship goes on after death, the exchange only transmuted by absence, the relationship advancing and maturing in a silent internal conversational way, even after one half of the bond has passed on.

But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long, close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self: the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

 

Prayer

Coming soon.