Sixth Sunday of Easter Year B

"God shows no partiality. Rather, in every nation whoever fears him and acts uprightly is acceptable to him."

Peter’s words are as applicable today as they were then. God shows no partiality. God’s ways are not our ways. “As high as the heavens are above the earth, so far are God’s ways from our ways.” “‘For My ways are not your ways,’ says the Lord….”

We can judge others so quickly and condemn others harshly and hastily, can't we?
Yet Jesus reveals to us that the way to the heart of God is through loving service to one another - regardless.

And what is the loving thing to do? Recall that God is love; we never read that God is hate. In fact, Saint John tells us in the second epistle today that God is love. Not that love is God – but that God is love itself.

Therefore, he tells us, “Beloved, let us love one another…. Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love.”

As Jesus said: "As the Father loves me, so I also love you. Remain in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and remain in his love.

This joy that Jesus promises us comes to us as we learn to love others, even those who we have the greatest difficulty loving, let alone liking.

Yet we are chosen by Christ, chosen and blessed, in his love. We are IN his love!
Before we even called out to Him or came to Him in faith, he was there loving us, calling to us, “For it was not you who chose me, but I who chose you! You are my friends if you do what I command you. I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.”

He says REMAIN in my love, unselfishly reaching out to others. And if we dare to live in his love, and loving as he did, seeking the happiness of others rather than our only our own happiness, we will find the joy of Christ.

There are those who claim that our acts of charity are but single drops of water in the vast ocean. Yet Mother Teresa held that no matter how small, our small drops add to the ocean – for the ocean is made up of many, many drops of water and each drop makes the ocean what it is.

Pope Benedict wrote in his encyclical Deus caritas est: [Christian] “love does not simply offer people material help, but refreshment and care for their souls, something which often is even more necessary than material support." In the end, some claim that…[our] works of charity [are] redundant [and even unnecessary]. Yet does this not betray “a materialist conception of man: the mistaken notion that man can live ‘by bread alone’.”

Some in our world reject charity and attack it “as a means of preserving the status quo. What we have here, though, is really an inhuman philosophy…. One does not make the world more human by refusing to act humanely here and now. We contribute to a better world only by personally doing good now, with full commitment and wherever we have the opportunity” regardless of politics. “The Christian's program...of the Good Samaritan, the program of Jesus, is ‘a heart which sees’.

The pope continues with this sobering thought: “Often the deepest cause of suffering is the very absence of God.” Yet “a pure and generous love is the best witness to the God in whom we believe and by whom we are driven to love. A Christian knows when it is time to speak of God and when it is better to say nothing and to let love alone speak. He knows that God is love and that God's presence is felt at the very time when the only thing we do is to love.”

Allow me to leave you with a story. There was once a woman who was filled with love for God. She was known to be quite religious and devout. Every morning she walked several city blocks to daily Mass at her parish church. As she walked children would sometimes call to her for a kind word, and the hungry and homeless would plead for help, bu the woman was so immersed in her prayer and in her love for God that she really didn’t pay much attention to the children and the hungry homeless.

One day she approached the church for morning Mass, passed a couple of children, and climbed the steps passing by a few homeless men and women; some were sleeping while others were staring blankly. As she opened the church door and walked in, expecting to see the long aisle and rows of pews and the high altar at the other end of the church, she was amazed that as she walked through the door what she thought was the inside of the church was instead a mirror image of the outside world she had just left. She turned and looked out through the open door of the church and saw that the outside world that she had just left behind was the same as the church inside. She stood at the top of the steps, looking down at the same needy children and homeless people she had passed by on her way to church.

She walked into the Church where the life-size crucifix hung suspended from the ceiling. Christ spoke: "Did you not see my Body – the Body of Christ – on the way to Church? Everyday, I have been waiting for you—not just in the church, but all around you – especially in all those who need your love. For whatsoever you do to the least of my people, that you do unto Me."

May we put the love of Christ in action today and every day.