It might not feel it, this beautiful morning in the beautiful season of Easter, but in the Gospel it is a dark night, and the darkest of all nights, the night of the Agony in the Garden and the abandonment of Jesus by His Disciples. The Gospel reading begins ‘When Judas had gone out’. There is a direct correlation between Judas going out and the darkness and the shadow of the coming evils of the trial and death of Christ and the knowledge that love conquers evil and the Son of God illuminates even the darkest night.

We are reminded of the words of Jesus, ‘The light has come into the world and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil’. So the darkness is to be dispelled by a new commandment ‘that you love one another as I have loved you’. But what is new about it? And why does this commandment remain new for the world two thousand years later? Why do we come here to this building to worship the source of love and to offer ourselves to the love that overcomes death and darkness?

First of all, because love is more than a commandment — it is a gift and it points to the gift of Jesus to the world by his Father. It’s a gift that we are asked to offer to each other here as well, and to model beautifully, in whatever way we can. Doing things lovingly is reflects the glorification of Jesus through his passion and death and passes that on to us and our children, and through his passion and death we too will be glorified with the glory given by the Father to Jesus. But more, through this the Father himself will be glorified. This is the point of our love, to glorify God in and through each other and to enfold ourselves into that love. In a short while we will have our Annual Parochial Council Meeting at which we look at what happened last year, elect new officers for the coming year and, above all, seek new ways to love one another and our community. This is the guiding principle of our faith and our existence here – to love.

Secondly, the new commandment of love is the expression of a covenant made with the world through the shedding of the blood of Jesus. The distinctiveness of this covenant is that it is an act of total self giving, an act of sublime generosity which reveals to us the Father’s generosity in giving us his Son.

If we keep this covenant of love, we are told, ‘all will know that you are my disciples’ — so we will in fact make the Spirit of Jesus present for all time to and within the world and specifically here, in this place. But we need to ask, how do we show this love? How are we changed by it? How does it make its home within us?

We need to reflect upon how John seems to understand the Trinitarian life of God, the relationship of the Son to the Father, and the relationship of the Father and the Son to the Holy Spirit. The Trinitarian life of God is not something ‘static’ — it is intensely dynamic. The Father sends the Son, and through them both, the Holy Spirit. In Baptism we receive the Holy Spirit and, as it were, make a return journey. Through the Holy Spirit we are united with Jesus and we ‘return’ with him to the Father. There is a processionality of love, through the creation wrought by the Father, the incarnation of the Son and the life of the Holy Spirit, living and moving in each other and catching us all up in that complex but infinitely simple dance of love, or hope and of new creation and creativity, in which we all find our home and our gifts may be used to the full, holding nothing back, not even our own selves, but giving ourselves to each other in a ceaseless act of love and surrender to the greater, cosmic, divine heart.

We are brothers and sisters of God and like Jesus we can call God ‘Abba’ Father; and we are made divine, not by nature as with Jesus, but by the gift of the new covenant of love which is greater than any other covenant and remains new and is made anew in every sacrifice of praise on our altar and on the altar of our heart.

When we love deeply, we know the sensation of that love with reciprocity. Likewise with God, this occurs through the Word of God, the life of the Church and through the Holy Spirit constantly making us new and calling us to life in Him and with each other. This love makes it possible to show the love of God to the world, because we will bear it so clearly in our own lives that it cannot be hidden, if we will just allow ourselves to be lost in love.

We become a light that dispels the darkness of evil, a light to the world. ‘By this will all people know that you are my disciples.’ But it will cost, as it cost Jesus, as there is no love without the cross, but this easter, we can rejoice that He has overcome the world and all things can be made new. Here is love, offered to us, all we have to do is take it.