6th Sunday of Easter 2021
Acts 10: 25-26, 34-35, 44-48; 1 John 4:7-10; John 15:9-17
You may be familiar with the saying “If you remember the 60s, you weren’t there”. I do, and I wasn’t, at least in the sense implied by that adage: namely, that if you were part of the 60s “scene”, you would have been too far gone on dope and acid to recall it.
I have to confess that the swinging 60s didn’t swing for me. It was the decade of Saturday morning school, O-levels, A-levels, Scholarship exams, and finally adjustment to the mysterious world of university in 1968, the year not only of student revolution, but also of Humanae Vitae and its tumultuous aftermath. I shall always be grateful that I had football refereeing to keep me relatively sane.
In the “Summer of Love” I didn’t go to San Francisco with flowers in my hair—though some of you may well have done so. I went to the Co-op Furnishing Dept. to earn some money. Nor, two years later, did I join the allegedly half a million souls who trekked to Woodstock to try to set their souls free, as Joni Mitchell expressed it in her song which one-hit-wonders Matthews Southern Comfort took to the top of the UK charts the following summer. I was back at the Co-op.
Some years later, probably in 1994, the twenty fifth anniversary, I watched a TV documentary about Woodstock, which featured interviews with some of the “beautiful people” who had been there. They were unanimous in their verdict: “we talked a lot about free love, but we have realised that there is no such thing: love is always costly”.
That puts me in mind of the two elderly Jewish ladies who, for some reason, were on the visiting list of the now defunct parish of St. Augustine, Preston, where I did my diaconate placement in the summer of 1975. (It beat working at the Co-op.) One of these ladies commented “Religion is the Lord, and religion is love, and love means sacrifice”.
This old lady had reached the same conclusion, though I suspect by a very different route, as the Woodstock veterans: namely that love is always costly. We can, I feel, leave to one side the theoretically correct, but experientially questionable claim that God’s love is free. It is freely given, but accepting it will inevitably entail sacrifice, and a sharing in the Cross.
If we doubted that, we have it spelt out by Our Lord in His call to mutual love which we have just heard. “No one can show greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” St. John sets this call in the context of the Last Supper, where Jesus has already summoned His friends to mutual service by washing their feet, and from which He will depart to provide the supreme example of sacrificial love by undergoing His passion and death.
Jesus’ great commandment is a commandment of love, a love made possible by the sacrificial love of Father and Son through the agency of the Holy Spirit; a love which will always demand sacrifice on our part.
That self-sacrificing love which entails the laying down of our lives must be seen in small things, otherwise we shall not be capable of the greater sacrifice. One thing which I gained from my summers at the Co-op was the memory of a cartoon, one of a number drawn on the wall of the Carpet Sewing Room, all the work of an artistic employee, and all featuring the Peanuts characters of Charles Schultz.
The one which lodged in my mind was a night-time scene, with a crescent moon in the sky, and Snoopy lying on top of his kennel. On the back doorstep of his house stood Charlie Brown, clad in his pyjamas, and holding a glass of water. Underneath was the caption: “Love is bringing someone a glass of water in the middle of the night”.
An anti-climax, isn’t it—bathos? Yet it expresses a profound truth. I have often quoted it in wedding homilies. If we are not prepared to make the small sacrifices of love, we shall never be capable of the greater. And to give a nod to the First Reading: the Holy Spirit has been poured out on us to make us able.
