Sermon: 4th Sunday of Easter
25 April 2021 –
Archdeacon Mark Long
Acts 4:5-12; Psalm
23; and John 10:11-18; NRSV
What does love look like? I have had the joy of solemnising the marriage of three couples in the Parish over the last four weeks, and love has been physically visible in the body language and responses of the couples to one another. Despite the nervous excitement of the moment each couple have radiated a confidence in their shared love, and I was particularly struck by the breadth of the groom’s smile on Friday afternoon. The nature of love expressed so powerfully in marriage is is based on a firm faith by the couple in one another, and a concrete hope in the resurrection gift of possibility and potential.
What does love look like? Today’s Gospel reading expresses it in these words, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”[1] Love here is expressed in this image of Christ’s unending and unfailing care for all God’s people, just as shepherds in Jesus’ time would have cared for sheep out in the wilderness, facing down predators at the possible cost of their own lives.[2] Love is also visible in Jesus words that there are other sheep that belong, too, although they belong to another flock; and that a time will come when there will be an easy diversity in our belonging – one shepherd and one flock.[3]
What does love look like? Today’s reading from Acts expresses it in these words, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.”[4] Love here is expressed in the sufficiency of Jesus’ name, and more specifically in the power of Jesus’ name, based in the reality of death and resurrection, in the possibility and potential for the renewal of our lives and relationships, and the healing of the brokenness and heartache we experience in our broader society.
What does love look like? Today’s Psalm expresses it in these words, “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.”[5] A beautifully simple reminder that in the Hebrew understanding of God, Yahweh satisfies every need. And more than that, God’s love provides for us in every aspect of life, and is never conditional. We know and love this Psalm through the poetic beauty of the King James’s translation, and are often comforted by it in the context of death, embedded as Psalm 23 is in our funeral rite. A more accurate translation of some Hebrew phrases reminds us that this Psalm is about an active journey through life, one where the green pastures and still waters are a brief respite on a journey where we continually seek to return into God’s presence, pursued only by goodness and mercy along paths of righteousness that are more game tracks through dark valleys of difficulty than my imagined highways of righteousness leading to eternal bliss.[6] This is what love looks like: life’s journey with God ever present providing all that we need on the demanding and difficult rutted pathways we often find ourselves traversing.
This is what love looks like. And this is the love you and I are called to make visible. When we look with honesty in the mirror, when we look around us in the more intimate context of family and friendships, and when we gaze out on society our love lacks so much, and is a very muted expression of the love today’s Scriptures reflect. Our love is insipid in comparison to God’s, our lives and love often so self-focused and conditional, our desire to have others conform to our will so dominant, that God’s love is diminished and disfigured in our living of it. And yet this is the call of Eastertide: to sacrifice what we have made of love that it may die, truly die; that out of the devastation of death our love may be resurrected, embraced in the fullness of God, restored and transformed, renewed into the fullness of all that love and life has been created by God to be. This is the Easter love we are given freely without any strings attached, a love we are invited by God to live not in our own strength alone, but in the strength and resilience of the Holy Spirit of God.
We need to live intentionally, awake daily to the potential and opportunities for living life creatively and fully, vulnerable before God and one another, sufficiently courageous to acknowledge any failure and open to God’s forgiveness in such a manner that our lives and relationships are continuously formed, reformed, and transformed; embracing one another across the diversity of our religious, cultural, and gender differences. Jesus’ resurrection is a constant reminder of the potential for new beginnings for ourselves, for others, and for our world. Each new beginning requires us to take a step in faith, trusting in God being ever present in our lives, the Good Shepherd continuously caring for us, resourcing us, loving us. This is the love we are called to live. Let’s live it!
Let us pray,
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