6th Sunday of Easter Year B

The theme of this Sunday’s gospel is on the familiar subject of love. However, the first reading sets this love which Jesus invites us to in the context of community expansion. The Christian community hitherto had primarily been made up of Jewish converts. However, Cornelius represents the opening of the Church to the gentile world. His baptism highlights the universality of God’s salvation. Salvation is no longer restricted to a particular race but is available to all people.

Therefore, we are to love the world and in loving (the world) bring the salvation of God to the ends of the world. In the days of old, this was a straightforward process. God’s saving love was interpreted in terms of making available the grace of baptism. Thus, missionaries blazed across the known world bringing with them the bible on the one hand and baptising on the other. In fact, our very own St Francis Xavier was reputed to have baptised 10000 people in Southern India within a period of two months in 1544.

However, these days, the process has become a little more complicated. We now have a greater respect for diversity and we generously embrace tolerance and inclusion. The result is that some people are given the impression that every religion is the same and baptism is not necessary.

This is where we are challenged. In loving the world, in mediating God’s saving love, the Church has to hold firm to the belief that baptism is still the ordinary means of salvation. She cannot, if She wants to be faithful, ignore the last command given by Her Lord and Saviour before His Ascension: Go, baptise all nations in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And, this is the crux of our challenge. Whilst the effect is the same for what we termed as the ordinary and the extraordinary means of salvation, that is, the effect is the same whether God saves ordinarily or out of the ordinary [1], the difference between them is a minefield for the Church. When God saves, He saves and it does not matter how because the effect of His salvation is the same, that is, we are saved. The minefield is this: We accept that God’s saving love is intended for all. We accept diversity. On the one hand, we like to think of ourselves as enlightened liberals and it is far easier to think that God’s vision is larger than our narrow understanding of salvation and that He can save however He wants. But, on the other hand, according to the Catechism,

[T]he Church does not know of any means other than baptism that assures entry into eternal beatitude; this is why she takes care not to neglect the mission she has received from the Lord to see that all who can be baptised are "reborn of water and the Spirit" [CCC #1257]. [2]

You begin to understand the difficulty or the tension involved—if God can save, why the necessity of baptism.

I think we excuse our failure at bringing the Gospel of salvation to people everywhere by saying that God is a far greater Lover than we are capable of being the good news. Thus, the question remains that if we are to remain faithful to Christ, how are we to propose the ordinary means of salvation to people whom we meet? The answer is through love as in the Gospel today.

And it is often that Christians fail at the task of loving as Christ loved us. Wasn’t it Gandhi who said that he believed in Jesus but he did not believe in Christians? The word “Crusade” itself is a reminder of much suffering brought about by Christians. In the name of God, the crusaders set out to free the Christian land from non-Christian control. In the process of doing God a favour, Christians poison the wells of their enemies. Is there any wonder why Christian—Muslim relationship is such a delicate issue? One of the Crusades even deviated from its original goal that instead of setting free the Holy Land, it plundered Constantinople which is present day Istanbul. Is it any wonder why the Orthodox Churches are suspicious about our Latin Rite Church?

The point is not to pass judgement upon generations past as if we were such saints but to note that we often have done a great disservice to the message of the Gospel through our behaviour. The disservice is when we preach the Gospel of love but fail to live that love. Each time when a person leaves the Church scratching someone’s car but driving away quietly; when a person is rude to the Hospitality Ministers who are trying to perform a duty, the person has made the Church poorer in the esteem of the world and made the Christian message a little more difficult to accept. I was reflecting about this and realised how often I myself have been such a poor excuse of a witness to this saving love of God. I feel like a hypocrite when I was thinking of these examples because my life itself is a sorry excuse for poor Christianity.

The Gospel message, however, does not call us to a generic. It is easy to love everyone because it does not require any commitment. Perhaps, we have been preaching the wrong thing, that is, we’ve been preaching “love one another" in a generic sense. The message of Christian love is lost in the generic.

But, say you live with a person who behaves outside the boundary of rationality or accepted norms of behaviour. How do you deal with that? Thus, the Gospel of love becomes real because “a man can have no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends”. We all marvel at Blessed Teresa of Calcutta. She was the epitome of what it meant to love because her love stretched out to all and that seemed to be generic enough. But really, she was able to do that simply because she must have taken to heart the Gospel injunction to lay down her life for a friend. She embraced the leper on the street because she saw in him none other than Christ Himself. Only when a Christian believes that there is someone worth dying for, will that Christian truly know the meaning of "love one another". It is a great price to be paid. The Greek word "martyr" means witness and from the time of the Apostles until now, whoever witnesses to the Gospel must be prepared to die for it. The world is not convinced by Christianity not because it’s not true but because our love is not convincing enough. Like Light FM, we have been fed on a diet of “light” Christianity, abandoning our conviction at the slightest inconvenience.

So, brothers and sisters, true love requires a readiness to die for the Gospel. Are you prepared? I know I hesitate and fail often and that is why the Eucharist is so important. St Maximillian Kolbe did not sit in his cell eagerly waiting for the moment to die for the Gospel. He stepped up when that crucial moment called for it and I believe the Eucharist he had celebrated and the Holy Communion he had received must have given him the necessary grace to stand up for the Gospel. So, let us ask God for this grace in the same Eucharist that gave both Blessed Teresa and St Maximillian Kolbe the courage to love as Christ Himself did.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] We need to allow for God to save extraordinarily, that is, God to save out of the ordinary, because baptism, as a means of salvation, is not always available to people everywhere. It means that a God who offers salvation to all cannot, in justice, condemn those who through no fault of theirs, are not privileged to be baptised
[2] God has bound salvation to the sacrament of baptism, but He Himself is not bound by His sacraments. This is the meaning of God saving extraordinarily.