Abide in Love
Easter 4 – April 21, 2024
Acts 4:5-12
Psalm 23
1 John 3:16-24
John 10:11-18
In our second reading and Gospel text for today there are two themes that run through them – love and death. Having so much love for others that you are willing to lay down your life for them. While our story from acts – a continuation from last week – does not actually mention love and death it does hint at them. The disciples are standing before the high council being accused of blasphemy. They could be facing death because of their faith and instead of confessing their sins as the council wanted them to, they confessed Jesus and invited the council to join in following Jesus. Doing so, they risked their lives. This is something completely different than what we usually hear about Christians today. That faith is all about your own self and future. The statement about choosing Jesus as your own personal savior would be incomprehensible to those early Christians. While they would understand that Jesus had saved them and given them a future and eternal life with Christ, they would not understand our emphasis of the personal aspect. For them faith was a communal event. Together, as the body of Christ, they supported each other and, more importantly, showed to the rest of the world how Jesus had changed their lives by how they lived together.
We do not know much about John’s community or even its location. It seems they were a close knit group of people who worshiped, studied, and witnessed about Jesus together. We get clues about this from noting that while the Gospel and three letters have the name of John attached to them, none of them was written by the disciple. Scholars now believe that the gospel, the first letter, and the second and third letters were written by different people at different times over a fifty year period. Which may indicate that there was some form of school attached to the community that produced these documents.
As I have said before, the community was important to those early Christians. There was no social safety net. Life was hard and if tragedy happened there was no one around to help, but with a community of believers there was. That is why the early Christians, as noted in Acts, tried to share all that they had. We do not know how long that lasted and even why it did not but it is a witness to us about the ideal life of Christians. Today there are many more possible communities that someone can be involved in, from a garden club to a gym to a political party, that the Body of Christ becomes just another possibility. Although it is only here that your whole life is shared with each other. We celebrate together and we mourn together. More importantly, here the community is bound together by love. Not our sometimes misguided love but by God’s love. A love so strong that it brings people to lay down their lives for others. So, washed in the waters of Baptism and fed at this table we are made to be the body of Christ – the body that laid down and still lays down its life for each other. Yes we, together with all the saints, belong to God who calls us to live our lives following our great shepherd sharing all that God has given us to all the world.