5^th Sunday of Easter [C] 2010

New things can be difficult. Children are notoriously reluctant to try an unfamiliar food put on their plates. And the older we get, the less many of us like to risk our happiness on the unknown. Will a move to a new town lead to better times or loneliness? Will a career change help or hurt us? Will our new status in life—married, bereaved, alone, or parenting—lead to growth and strength or simply misery? It’s no wonder so many people dye their hair or dwell on the glory days of yesteryear. We want to hang on to what we know. We love our comfort zones.

Imagine then how the early Jewish followers of Jesus must have felt as they watched “their” church welcoming more and more outsiders, Gentiles, so much so that they, the Jewish Christians were now a minority. The story of God’s people had begun with Abraham and Sarah, through Moses and the prophets, all the way to Jesus of Nazareth. It was an Israelite story! But now the future would be in the hands of people from other countries and cultures who spoke different languages. How do you suppose they found the courage to let go?

But “new” can also be good. Ask the proud guy who’s just come back from the dealership with a shiny new car in his driveway, or the woman with the fresh promotion at work, or the couple holding the tiny baby for the first time. When the world was new, as the story goes in Genesis, everything was as good as that. And in the vision of the final days, which John describes in today’s passage from the Book of Revelation, God pledges to make all things new once more.

“The former world will pass away,” he says, which may sound a bit sad when you think of your favorite spot on the most perfect day you can remember. But along with the old world goes war, and hunger, and disease and disability, loneliness and pain, and even death. Fear, anger, anxiety, grief and boredom will disappear. Evil and its many fruits will be banished, and the three great theological virtues will remain: faith, hope and love—the three great virtues, which we can never acquire on our own, but only by the grace of God.

Some of us may be impatient for this new world to come, and we don’t want to wait…. We don’t have to—if we cultivate those three virtues, we will taste the sweetness of the new creation today.

Finally, we hear Jesus today in the Gospel talking about new—I give you a new commandment: love one another. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? But new things usually come with new responsibilities. You start school, and bring home your first batch of homework. You get a bicycle to replace your tricycle, but now you have to learn the rules of traffic. You fall in love, and quickly find out that romance is no free lunch. You sign the deed on the house, but now you have walls to paint and grass to cut.

And new life in Christ also comes with responsibilities. The heart of his message, the central commandment, can seem strange at first: love one another? Well, sure. But it’s not just “getting along.” It is much more than that. It is seeing Christ in the other, even, or maybe especially in the other we find so annoying. It is placing the other’s well-being and happiness before my own. That is new, isn’t it? But Jesus tells us it’s the one thing needed: if we practice ways and habits of love, then all other things will fall into place. People who love and are responsive to others will not hate or cause harm, will not show prejudice or do injustice. A society motivated by principles of love would be a wonderful community in which to live. And a world wrapped in love would be a world at peace. We can only get there heart by heart. “I give you a new commandment: Love one another.”