6th Sunday of Easter Year B 2024

The imagery of the Vine and the branches remains with us this Sunday. Our relationship with Jesus the Vine, from Whom we draw sustenance, ought to be fruitful. Two scriptural examples help illustrate this truth. Both the barren fig tree and vineyard remind us that charity (love) is the sensible or supernatural fruit of our relationship with Jesus Christ. It follows since God is love and His love reaches out to us through Jesus Christ. And as we inch closer to Pentecost, the very same love of God in Jesus Christ that flows in us is now poured onto the world through the Holy Spirit.

The wind of the Spirit is already blowing in the background of today’s 1st Reading. The Church’s evangelical expansion is symbolised through the conversion of Cornelius. Last week we heard of St Paul’s conversion and today St Peter himself noted that when it comes to loving humanity, God shows no favouritism. Through the Church, the Holy Spirit will assume His pivotal role in the drama of salvation.

The Gentile universe deserves God’s love which means that every nation should enjoy the salvation brought by Jesus Christ His Son. Backed by the Spirit, the foray of the Church into Gentile territories ties in truly with the notion of God as the loving Saviour. The idea that a deity saves a narrow of band of humanity does not do justice to the concept of a loving God who saves. In, with and through the Church, God’s salvific reach is universalised. In other words, a saviour whose reach is restricted cannot be the Saviour that humanity and history have been waiting for.

God’s love for humanity is not generic. It was directed firstly towards Israel and through the Jews His love reaches out to the entire world. Through His Son who died for us on the Cross, the Father revealed His love. Now, the Son who sacrificed Himself for us invites us all to love like He has. He calls us to imitate His love.

What does the imitation of Christ’s love consist of?

We may have somehow signed into a notion of charity which is best expressed by the vocabulary of self-love. We hear this all the time. “Learning to love yourself it is the greatest love of all”. So, we ought to be good to ourselves. We need to forgive ourselves. Actually, all these are not bad in themselves. In loving ourselves and treating ourselves well, we may have forgotten that the true nature of love is sacrificial. The Christ who loved us emptied Himself so that we might have life to the full. In short, love is inseparable from sacrifice.

The chorus from the Prayer attributed St Francis of Assisi or simply the Prayer supposedly of St Ignatius are clues to the kind of sacrifices we are called to. “Grant that I may never seek to understand as to understand, to be loved as to love”. Or “Teach me to serve you as you deserved. To labour and not seek for rest”. Jesus Himself said, “Unless a grain of wheat falls on the ground and dies, it remains but a single grain”. Sacrificial love is defined by St Thomas Aquinas as willing the good of the other.

To be able to reach out to the other, there has to be a corresponding union with God because it is not easy to love sacrificially. By nature, we are instinctively selfish. The self-help philosophy merely amplifies or reinforces the drive towards self-preservation. Ordinarily, nobody in the right frame of mind wants to sacrifice himself or herself. Thus, the idea of an organic unity between the Vine and the branches shows us how important our union with God is. The ability to lay down one’s life is a supernatural strength. Allowing Him to love us gives us strength to love and to reach out to others.

We need God’s love because our union with others often takes us out of ourselves. A good example is helping the poor. Which is easier? Give RM100 to feed the poor or spend time with a poor family to listen to their woes? It is more psychologically demanding to hear peoples’ tales of woes than to conveniently salve or soothe our “guilt” by donating. The point that love takes us out of ourselves is not something new or alien to us. If you are a loving parent, you will sacrifice for your children. If you have aged parents whom you value, you will also sacrifice. If you are happily married, you give up many freedoms. Even though self-preservation may be ingrained in us but what is inherently true about us is also the noble desire of going beyond ourselves. When we consider sacrifice, it is not as if God is waiting to exact His pound of flesh. Instead, this sacrificial drive to rise above ourselves is founded on the God who first sacrificed Himself for us. A person who has fallen in love knows the feeling of desiring to return love for love. Loving another is not a duty but rather an appreciation of the love that we have received from God.

Finally, the Catholic system of penance and mortification is central to this disposition to go beyond ourselves. When we think of self-sacrifice, we often imagine a moment of heroic self-immolation or destruction. Closer to the truth is that a martyr would have died a thousand deaths before arriving at the grand gesture of laying down his or her life. Only when we have learnt self-denial on a daily basis can we die to ourselves ultimately. It starts very simply, like having to endure minor discomfort and inconveniences. The seemingly boring morning offering to the Sacred Heart of Jesus captures this succinctly. “O Jesus, through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I offer You my prayers, works, joys and sufferings of this day for all the intentions of Your Sacred Heart, in union with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass throughout the world…”. Nothing of what we endure is ever wasted in our offering to the Lord.

Ultimately, the call to imitate Christ’s love, to be Christ in the world, can only be founded upon one’s union with Him. This is probably a common dilemma. Those who embrace a regular sacramental life seem to struggle more. It raises the question of the Sacraments’ efficacy. What is the difference of having or not? Two points to note here. First, the more we desire the Lord, the more Satan will rage and plot against us. It is not the failure of the Sacraments which brings us to the 2nd point. It is a realisation that often it is we who have placed obstacles to the efficacy of the Sacraments. Thus, the response is not having less but rather more of the Sacraments. It is the lifeline to Christ because to love to the point of laying down our lives requires supernatural strength. St Paul reminds to “draw strength from the Lord and His mighty power and to put on the armour of God in order to stand firm against the devil”. Indeed the opposite of love is not hatred but Satan. To love is to stand against Satan armed only with the love of Christ.