This
is the homily that was given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, by Fr.
Gene Tucker on Sunday, May 6, 2018.
“AN ENTIRELY
NEW PARADIGM”
(Homily texts: Acts 10: 44–48, I John 5: 1–6 & John 15:
9–17)
Jesus
Christ’s bursting onto the world scene is the singular event which creates for
all humanity an entirely new way of understanding our relationship with God.
With Christ, a new paradigm is brought into being.
Our
three appointed readings for this morning bear out this idea. Let’s do some
exploring together.
A relationship with God which is
offered to all people everywhere: Our first reading this morning is a portion
of the incident in which Peter is directed by the Holy Spirit to go to a city
called Joppa to meet with a Roman army centurion named Cornelius. The earlier
portion of the tenth chapter of the Book of Acts makes clear that Peter harbors
some reservations about going to meet with a Gentile. But the Spirit enables
him to overcome those concerns, and so he goes to the meeting. Peter, along
with the other Jewish believers, are astonished to see evidence that God has
poured out His Holy Spirit even on the Gentiles. But Peter and the others
shouldn’t have been surprised at this development, for the Lord Himself had
told them at the time of His ascension that Peter and the others would be His
“witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
(Acts 1: 8) What the Lord had indicated by way of direction and prediction now
comes into being with the encounter with Cornelius.
The
question then arises: How is this understanding a new way of seeing people’s
relationship with God? Perhaps the answer is that, in Christ, all people
everywhere are offered the avenue by which they may establish a relationship
with God. In the world of Judaism, that relationship existed by way of being a
blood descendant of Abraham. Those within Judaism were willing to accept non-Jewish
persons into an understanding of God, but the evidence might suggest that the
relationship of these Gentiles to God was of a lesser and more remote variety.
Such persons who had come to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were
known as “God-fearers”
A God of love who loves us and who
desires that we love in return: Both the Gospel text for this morning and the
reading from the First Letter of John emphasize the word “love”. We could
summarize the writer’s intent by saying that he wants us to know that God’s
essential nature is one of love, and that that divine love is the sort of love
that invites us into the very innermost reaches of God’s love. The Lord says,
in our Gospel text for this morning, that we have been invited into the
relationship that the Father has with the Son (and vice versa), for now, we who
have come to faith, have had revealed to us the nature of God’s inner life. We
are no longer servants of slaves who do not know what the master is doing, but
now, the Lord, says, we are called “friends”.
The
idea that those who come to faith in God through the revelation of Jesus Christ
could be intimately folded into God’s life and love was foreign to the
understandings of Judaism and also of the Gentile, pagan world. Consider first
the understanding of Judaism: For the Judaism of 2,000 years ago, God was
remote, removed from the everyday world that we human navigate. God’s name was
so holy that it could not be spoken. God was related to, in the Judaism of that
time and place, by the keeping of God’s commandments, which carried with them
the threat of punishment if those commandments were violated.
For
the pagan world, the gods were also remote from everyday life. Moreover, those
pagan gods required appeasement in order that their evil intents toward
humanity could be nullified. There is no element of love involved in relating
to such deities.
Keeping the commandments:
“Keep the commandments, or else,” That might be a good way to summarize both
the Jewish and pagan understandings of God’s will for humankind. For the
ancient children of Abraham, the endurance of the covenant that God had made in
the giving of the Law of Moses, the Torah, was dependent on the faithfulness of
God’s people in being able to hold up their end of the bargain. A basic way of
understanding such a covenant is with the phrase which says, “If you (God’s
people) will do so-and-so, then I (God) will do such-and-such”. The nature of such
a covenant is one which is conditional.
(There are other, non-conditional covenants in the Old Testament: God’s
covenant with Noah which states that God will never again destroy the earth by
a flood is an example. See Genesis 9: 8–17.)
We
have alluded to a similar understanding among the pagan peoples of the ancient
world, for they sought to stay in the pagan gods’ favor by doing things that
would please those deities.
God’s
revelation of Himself, made perfect in the Christ-event, establishes a new
motivation for keeping the commandments: The motivation is now one of love for
God, not the fear of punishment. We want to do all that we can to please God
out of our love for Him. By so doing, the depth and the intensity of God’s love
for us and our love for God is enhanced.
In
the fullness of time, God sent His only begotten Son to take up our humanity,
and by such immersion in our human condition, God has established with us a new
relationship and a new way of relationship with God, one which is offered to
all people everywhere, one which is based on love, not on the fear of punishment
and estrangement, and one which motivates us to keep God’s way as our response
of love.
AMEN.
