Sixth Sunday of Easter
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments”
Overview
Sixth Sunday of Easter
In the time after the Resurrection and before the Ascension our Gospel readings this year focus on Jesus reassuring the disciples: where will they find God without him? how will they know which way to follow? Today, in John 14:15-21, Jesus again explains that God is present there in and among them; that were there is community, dwelling together in love, there God will be also. Paul echoes this in Acts 17:22-31 as he stands in the public square before the statues of every God: “God does not live in shrines made by human hands” for “in him we live and move and have our being.” Paul’s message is universal, we all bear God’s imprint, for “he made all nations” and we are all his offspring. Where we see the works of love offered to all, there we see God.
The work of love has no limits but we do. Jesus calls us not rely on own strength but to be drawn into closer relationship with one another and God, so that the gift of love may be shared among us. As we grow into beloved community, able to both give and receive, we find ourselves resourced for the work God gives us.
This Sunday also marks the beginning of Christian Aid Week. This year the focus is on families who are being helped to grow their own food in a crowded informal settlement outside Nairobi. Supporting Christian Aid is one way in which we can share God's love in practical action to help our neighbours in deprived parts of God's world.
FIRST READING
Acts 17:22-31
Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely spiritual you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps fumble about for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said,
‘For we, too, are his offspring.’
“Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead
GOSPEL
John 14:15-21
If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him because he abides with you, and he will be in you.
“I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me, and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.
