| Readings: | Acts 4:8-12 |
| Date: | April 21, 2024, Fourth Sunday of Easter, Cycle B |
I assume that most of you here have celebrated the sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation and Eucharist. We call these 3 sacraments, the sacraments of initiation. By these 3 sacraments we are initiated into, or formed into, being members of the body of Christ. Do you ever stop to think about what it means to say that by Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist, we are formed into the body of Christ? Or what it means to say that Christ came to save the world? And how those two statements are connected?
Jesus talked about salvation, saving the world, using the concept of God's kingdom. It is God's plan that through the Jesus' life, death and resurrection that God's kingdom comes, and God's will is done here on earth as it is in heaven. We say this all the time when we pray the Our Father but do we really understand what we are praying for? The kingdom of God is a way of human beings living completely out of love. It means that there is no war, no conflict, no hunger, no oppression, no power over. It means that every human act is done out of love. I find sometimes that is hard to even imagine what that would be like because it is so different from what I experience in the world today.
How God makes this happen is a mystery so we will never completely understand it, but those two short verses from the first letter of John give us one image of how God's plan to transform the world into His kingdom could work. Those verses say that we are now children of God, really and truly because Jesus' paschal mystery has made us his brothers and sisters. The author goes on to say that what we will be has not been revealed, and here we can understand this "we will be" to refer to what will happen to us individually when we die and stand face to face with God, or to what will happen, when at the second coming, all creation will be transformed into paradise and stand face to face with God. But even though we cannot comprehend what we will be like when we come face to face with God, the author goes on to say that we know that we will be like God because we will see God as God really is.
When we are face to face with someone who really and deeply loves us, it changes us. Those of you who have experienced any kind of deeply loving relationship know that. Love changes us. Coming face to face with Love itself will change us into love. That is God's plan for changing the world. By becoming incarnate, God who is Love changes anyone for the better who takes the time to encounter that love. This plan started with God choosing a special people to incarnate his love in the form of the Law and the Prophets. Then in the fullness of time he sent his only begotten Son, who is God, to become human and make Love incarnate in the person of Jesus. Now Jesus calls us who have been baptized to be the mystical Body of Christ, making the God who is Love incarnate right here and now, and through all of the world and all of time.
This is one way that I visualize how God's plan works. How many here have ever done one of those jigsaw puzzles with hundreds of pieces? When you only have a few pieces together you can't tell what the picture is. But as you start to put in more pieces, even before you have it filled in, if you step back and squint a little, you can start to see the picture. If all of us who have been baptized start to act like Christ, start to love the way Jesus loves us, then someone passing by might stop and squint and see God more closely as God really is. That person will then be transformed and want to join us, adding one more piece to the puzzle so that the next person coming by can see this image of God a little better, and so on and so on till we become like God because we see God as God really is.
There was a rabbi who lived around the year 100 AD who wrote that he thought that the Messiah would come, the kingdom of God would come into being fully when every Jew in the world lived out all 413 commandments in the Torah perfectly for one day, 24 hours. As I think about the explanation of how seeing God as God really is can change us, I think about what would happen if everyone who is baptized in the world lived out the one commandment Jesus gave to love one another as he loves us for one whole day! What if 2/3 of us did that, or even 1/2? I think it would make a tremendous difference in the world.
Salvation has come to this world through Christ. There is no salvation through anyone else, nor is there any other name under heaven given to the human race by which we are to be saved. We have to realize that these words are not talking about who gets to heaven when they die. They certainly do not mean that everyone has to become a Christian. They are simply stating the truth about God's plan for the salvation of all creation. But that salvation is not yet complete. That completion depends on the body of Christ making Love increasingly more present in this world by living out our initiation into the Church. Eucharist is the continual renewal of our initiation to be the body of Christ, the incarnation of God as God really is, to all we meet.
Beloved: See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are. So as we celebrate this Eucharist, may receiving Communion form us more fully into the Body of Christ, so that salvation will come sooner rather than later.