We are still in the season of Easter, when we continue to reflect on the meaning and significance of the resurrection. What did it mean for the disciples and what does it mean for us? Our readings for today give us some strong clues.
In Acts, Peter has just had a vision in which a sheet descends from heaven filled with all sorts of creatures – the kinds of animals and reptiles and birds that the Jews were forbidden from eating. Peter then hears a voice telling him to kill and eat the creatures. He is horrified and protests that he has never broken the strict purity laws forbidding him to eat such things! The next message astounds him: the voice tells him not to call anything unclean that God has made clean.
Immediately three men arrive, and the Holy Spirit prompts Peter to go with them to a man’s house who has been told that Peter will come to him with a message by which he and his family will be saved. When Peter gets to the man’s house and begins to tell him about Jesus, the Holy Spirit falls upon the man, just as it had fallen on the disciples on the day of Pentecost. Peter remembers how he and the other disciples had been baptised with the Holy Spirit, and he thinks, “If God gave these people the same gift that he gave us, who was I to think that I could oppose God?”
In that moment Peter understood that the gift of God’s Holy Spirit was not intended for the Jews alone, but for everyone. No longer was there to be a ‘them’ and ‘us’ but everyone was included in the love of God and in the work of Christ’s salvation and redemption. This was a revelation about a new way of seeing other people – and God!
Now to the Gospel of John, and back to the last time Jesus had supper with his friends, before his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. As he walks with his disciples towards the garden, he gives them his final teachings – the most important things for them to know. He tells them that he will soon be going away and he gives them a new commandment – “Love one another. As I have loved you so you must love one another.” This supersedes and sums up all the other laws. The disciples, and by extension, all Christians, are to focus on keeping the supreme law of love – certainly much simpler, but not at all easy! In fact, if we are honest with ourselves, we know that by ourselves we cannot live up to the standards of love. We need the continual and on-going help of God’s Holy Spirit to live as God’s children.
For Jews, this was a huge shift from living on the basis of trying to keep the religious laws, to the basis of relying on the Holy Spirit by faith. For anyone who has ever tried to ‘work’ themselves into God’s good books, this shift demands that they think about God in a new way and also that they pay attention to their motivation for all that they do.
It is because of the resurrection we can trust that the power of love is stronger than anything else. We can trust that Jesus fulfilled his earthly mission as the Messiah and that he returned to his eternal spiritual position within the Holy Trinity. We can also trust that the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead now lives in us. The resurrection gives us the hope and surety that what God promises is true, and that God’s truth will prevail.
The Revd Christina Rees