Acts 11: 1-18 Revelation 21: 1-6 John 13:31-35
Today’s three readings fit together splendidly. Our Gospel tells of Jesus issuing a new commandment:
…that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.
Our reading from Acts shows one of the ways in which Peter and the other Apostles came to realize that this the commandment would involve radical changes in their outlook and their relationships with other people and our reading from Revelation looks forward to a future in which Jesus’ new commandment is fully implemented.
“…the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples.”
Searching on the internet for a way of illustrating those themes – commandment, change and fulfilment – I came across a quotation from one of the chief engineers who worked on the Panama Canal.
The Panama Canal is in the news at the moment because President Trump has recently threatened to take back control of it. The back story is that it was built with American money and expertise after a French attempt to construct it failed. The building of the canal was a hugely challenging project. The terrain was very difficult, with jungle to cut through, hills to circumvent, primitive living conditions for the workers and the danger of catching Yellow Fever and Malaria as a result of mosquito bites. There were a number of setbacks and disasters, and the plans for building the canal changed over time.
The American project began in 1904, and the first two chief engineers appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt resigned in frustration at the difficulties of the task and the criticisms that they received. The second of those engineers, John Frank Stevens, was the one who realized that the attempt to build the entire canal at sea level was doomed to failure. He explained to Congress that success could only be achieved by building locks and they took his advice.
When Jesus commanded his followers
…that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.
he set them an enormous challenge. He wasn’t asking them to believe in a particular set of theological propositions, he was asking them for something far simpler and yet much more difficult, a call to join a process of love which has the potential to transform the world.
To contribute to any process involves accepting change. Our reading from Acts shows Peter accepting that the commandment to love one another involves change. He had been brought up as a devout Jew, committed to the law of Moses. Then he had been called to follow Jesus and had watched his master hanging out with publicans, sinners and gentiles, affirming women and even praising the faith of a Roman centurion. And now more of his assumptions were being questioned. The vision he experienced challenged the Jewish dietary laws which he had always observed. The message he heard was:
‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’
In response to that call, and prompted by the Holy Spirit he travelled to Caesarea, understanding that
“The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us.”
Them being, of course, Gentiles – non-Jews, people with whom law-abiding Jews would not share table fellowship because doing so would render them unclean.
He found that the Holy Spirit has got there ahead of him. The people he met were already receptive to the Gospel. He didn’t even need to preach.
“And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning.”
That testimony of Peter’s was a hugely important moment in the process by which Christianity ceased to be a sect within Judaism and became the world religion it is today. Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, Christians have continued to question the assumptions on which “us and them” thinking is based and moved to being a more inclusive church. That’s a process which remains incomplete, a process which we are called to pursue in love as we continue to discern what it means to live out the new commandment that Jesus gives in today’s Gospel:
…that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.
A call to join a process of love which can transform the world.
The process of change has at times been messy, and Christians have, and still do, fall far short. Our secularist critics are quick to point out the lamentable failures to obey Christ’s commandment that have happened in the past – the horrors of the Crusades, the cruelty of the Inquisition, Christian support for slavery – and that still happen in the present; think of the scandal of Christian leaders abusing children and vulnerable adults.
And those criticisms bring us back to the story of the building of the Panama Canal and the quotation that I found on the internet. The third chief engineer, Colonel George Washington Goethals, was appointed in 1907. He faced enormous criticism about his handling of the project and there’s a well-known anecdote about him. One of his colleagues asked him
“When are you going to answer your critics?”
“In time”, he replied.
The colleague persisted.
“But when?”
And the Chief Engineer’s answer was simple:
“When the canal is finished.”
He brought the project to completion in 1914.
I think it is legitimate to answer secularist criticisms about the many ways in which Christians have and still do fall short of obeying Christ’s commandment in a way that is similar to Colonel Goethals’ answer to the colleague who asked him when he was going to respond to his critics. The process of our trying to obey Christ’s commandment isn’t yet finished. Our reading from Revelation gives us a visionary glimpse of what the end of that process will be like, how it will fully be realized in a new creation in which
“…the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples.”
That is a heartening passage for it teaches that with God’s help and grace flawed human beings like ourselves can make the changes in our outlook and behaviour that are needed if Christ’s command to love one another is fully to be realized. Each generation of Christians is challenged, just as Peter was challenged, to discern the changes that are needed to move the process forward to its glorious completion.
The fact that the word peoples in that passage from Revelation is plural is very significant. It points us to strive for a perfected human community in which difference is acknowledged as a glory rather than a problem, and it reminds us of the lesson that Peter learned, that God does not confine God’s love and grace to us and withhold it from them.