Easter Week 6 Sunday (Year B)

Readings: Acts 10.25-26, 34-35, 44-48; Psalm 97; 1 John 4.7-10; John 15.9-17

It is God who takes the initiative, always, and all our words and acts in relation to God are always by way of response, an echo, to one who has first spoken to us, one who has first instructed us, one who has first loved us. All three readings today have this priority of God's word and action at their heart.

Peter comes to see that God does not have favourites. How does he come to this realisation? Through a vision given to him, confirmed by the coming of the Holy Spirit on Cornelius and his household. 'Anybody, of any nationality, who fears God and does what is right, is acceptable to him.' The community of believers is to be called 'catholic', universal, since it is for everyone. In the following chapter of Acts we read of the believers first being called Christians. Here already, we might say, they are to be 'Catholic' Christians.

The second reading spells it out clearly. Love comes from God, God's love for us when he sent his Son. So it is not our love in the first place that needs to be recognised but God's love since, as the same letter says further on, it was God who 'first loved us' (4.19).

So too in the gospel reading. All begins in the Father's love for the Son but those who are brought into friendship with Jesus, who remain in his love, are made able to love each other as Jesus loved them. It is John's version of the great commandment, now the new commandment, Jesus's own commandment: 'love one another as I have loved you'.

You did not choose me - it was not your initiative - but I chose you. It is all grace, then, and this passage from the gospel of John has been at the centre of all understandings of grace from the beginning - friendship with God, first loved and chosen by God, the Incarnate Son laying down his life for his friends, all coming at the completely free initiative of God. God's love is the source of all that is.

It is how we will know that we have been begotten by God, that we have received the Spirit of God - when we truly love one another and are doing it in the way Jesus loved, and loves, us.