🙏 SUNDAY INSIGHTS - THE 6TH SUNDAY OF EASTER 🙏

First Reading - Acts 10:25-26,34-35,44-48

Second Reading - 1 John 4:7-10 

Gospel - John 15:9-17

G. K. Chesterton once said that the really great lesson of the story of “Beauty and the Beast” is that a thing must be loved before it is loveable. — A person must be loved before that person can be lovable. Some of the most unlovely people I have known got that way because they thought that nobody loved them. The fact of the matter is that unless, and until, we feel ourselves loved, we cannot love. That’s not only a principle of theology but of psychology and sociology as well. Just as abused children grow up to abuse their children, loved children grow up to love their children. Loved persons are able to love. Unloved persons are not. Christianity says something startling: God loves and accepts us “just as we are.” Therefore, we can love and accept ourselves and, in so doing, love and accept others. That is what Jesus commands us to do in today’s Gospel by challenging us to love others as he has loved us. 

In the first reading, Peter teaches us that God shows no partiality in His love and that there are no boundaries to abiding in love. God loves everyone, both Jews and Gentiles, and wants everyone to be saved through His son Jesus. That is why God welcomed the Roman centurion Cornelius as the first non-Jew to become a Christian. The reading tells us how God also allowed the Gentiles who heard Peter’s speech to receive the same Holy Spirit and His gifts that Peter’s Jewish audience had received on the day of Pentecost. 

Today’s Responsorial Psalm (Ps 98) also directs our attention toward God’s marvelous love and kindness in offering salvation to the whole world. 

In the second reading, John defines God as love and explains that He expressed His love for mankind by sending His son to die for us humans “as expiation for our sins.” This Divine love gives us the command, and so the duty, to love one another as we have been loved by God. Since God has loved us first, we can and should love God in return, love ourselves properly, and love one another. 

After telling the parable of the vine and branches in today’s Gospel, Jesus teaches the disciples that they are to remain in a living bond with him as branches grow from and so are bound to a vine. They are to obey his commandment of love just as he has obeyed his Heavenly Father’s will, by fulfilling His commandments and remaining inseparably One with his Father. Jesus’ unconditional, forgiving, selfless, sacrificial love for us must be the criterion of our love for others. The highest expression of this love is our willingness to lay down our lives as Jesus did, for people who don’t deserve it. The goal and result of our abiding in love, in God, will be perfect joy. Jesus calls us friends; he tells us that he has chosen us, and that, if we use his Name, we can ask the Father for anything

Dear friends, we need to cultivate an abiding and loving friendship with Jesus. We need to express this love in our relationships with others by loving them and offering them trust, faithfulness, equality, forgiveness, joy, and sacrifice.

Jesus demonstrated the love God, his Father, has for us by living for us and dying for us. Hence, as his disciples, we are to be persons for others, sacrificing our time, talents, and lives for others. This is what parents spontaneously do for their children by sacrificing themselves, their time, talents, health, and wealth for them. That is, they “spend” themselves for their children. The most effective way of communicating God’s love to others is by treating everyone as a friend, giving each the respect he or she deserves as a human being, God’s creation. In moments of trial and stress, when people are hostile or ungrateful and we feel the pull of bitter resentment in our hearts, it is important for us to remember that Christ’s own love was not limited to the people he liked. Hence, we should close our minds to thoughts of revenge.