Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year A
First Reading: Acts 6:1–7
Second Reading: 1 Pt 2:4–9
Gospel Reading: Jn 14:1–12

In his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (“God Is Love”), Pope Benedict XVI said that “the entire activity of the Church is an expression of a love that seeks the integral good of man”—that is, the good of the whole of each person, body and soul.

Accordingly, the Church’s love for humans takes the forms of 1) “evangelization through word and sacrament” and 2) promotion of human life and activity in its “various arenas.”

In this Sunday’s First Reading, we see both these forms of love. The apostles realized that their own task was to pray and preach God’s word, but they appointed deacons to “wait on tables.” They were obeying both of God’s commands: to love God with our whole being and to love our neighbours as ourselves.

The two commands are related, Pope Benedict noted. When we obey God, the communion between our will and his develops into a communion of thought and feeling. God’s will becomes no longer “alien,” something imposed from outside; it becomes our own. Then, the Pope said, “in God and with God,” we love people we do not like or even know, for we look on them not simply with our own eyes and feelings, but from Christ’s perspective: his friend is our friend.

Thus we see the interplay between love of God and love of neighbour, the Pope said. If we have no contact with God in our lives, we cannot see his image in other people. For example, our society condemns slavery, abuse, and unjust discrimination, yet murders unborn babies and old people because it has neglected love of God, who gives all persons their objective value and their inalienable rights. On the other hand, if we have no contact with other people, our relationship with God becomes dry and loveless.

The Pope praised saints who “constantly renewed their capacity for love of neighbour from their encounter with the Eucharistic Lord,” and described how “this encounter acquired its realism and depth in their service to others.”

Love of God and love of neighbour are “inseparable,” the Pope said; “they form a single commandment.” Love “is divine because it comes from God and unites us to God,” but “it makes us a ‘we’ which transcends our divisions and makes us one, until in the end God is all in all.”

As members of what St. Peter, in the Second Reading, calls “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people,” we have the duty to “proclaim the mighty acts” of him who called us “out of darkness into his marvellous light.” Love of our neighbour in his totality demands that we proclaim Jesus as “the way, and the truth, and the life,” for no one comes to God except through him, Jesus says in the Gospel Reading.

It is true that those who do not know Jesus can be saved “by virtue of a grace” which “enlightens” them in a way appropriate to “their spiritual and material situation,” says the Vatican document Dominus Iesus. However, it is not true that all religions are “equally valid ways of salvation.”

With Christ’s coming, God has willed “that the Church founded by him be the instrument of salvation for all humanity.” This does not lessen the Church’s respect for other religions, but “it rules out” the idea “that one religion is as good as another.”

All mediation between God and man is a participation in Christ’s mediation; there is no other. The grace that calls us out of darkness into light “comes from Christ; it is the result of his sacrifice and is communicated by the Holy Spirit” through the Catholic Church, for “the Lord Jesus continues his presence and his work of salvation in the Church and by means of the Church, which is his Body.”

If we truly love our neighbours, we will not keep this truth to ourselves.

Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English with new insights, in print and YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. He is also teaching the course in person on Sundays (2–4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver) and Mondays (10 a.m.–noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver). The title of next week’s talk is Marriage and the Family.