First Reading: Acts 4:32-35
Second Reading: 1 Jn 5:1-6
Gospel Reading: Jn 20:19-31
“Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God,” St. John says in this Sunday’s Second Reading, “and everyone who loves the parent loves the child;” that is, those God has adopted through baptism.
The First Reading shows how the early Christians practised this love. “The whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul,” it says; “everything they owned was held in common.”
Many people seem to think that Christianity comprises simply such “love of neighbour.” They claim that all religions teach the same ethics: do not kill, steal, commit adultery, or lie. They seem to ignore the first three commandments: not to put anything before God, not to invoke his name frivolously, and to keep his day holy.
We can see that God’s command to love our neighbour is important: if we do not love them, they will not love us, and life on earth will become impossible.
However, Christ said that “the first and greatest commandment” is to love God above everything else. In fact, the other two readings this Sunday, which Pope St. John Paul II named Divine Mercy Sunday, stress the importance of belief in the events by which God showed us his mercy: the passion, death, resurrection, and ascension of his son, Jesus.
“Who is it who conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?” St. John asks. He wrote his Gospel, he says, so that his readers “may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God,” and that through believing, we may “have life in his name.”
“Do not doubt, but believe,” Jesus says to St. Thomas in the Gospel Reading. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
Many people think that Christianity can be summarized as follows: “Be good, and you’ll be happy; be bad, and you’ll be punished.” Perhaps that is why COVID-19 dismays them. They have been good, or at least not too bad, they think; why is God punishing them?
Christianity is not a simple bargain for happiness between us and God. Rather, through his Church, Christ offers us the possibility of becoming divine, of sharing God’s very life, of being made perfect as God is perfect.
Is this promise “over the top”?
No. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that from the beginning, God planned to “divinize” us. It says that God became man so that we might become “sharers of the divine nature”; so that man “might become a son of God”; so that God, “made man, might make men gods;” so that “we might become God.”
“At the heart of the divine act of creation is the divine desire to make room for created persons in the communion of the uncreated Persons” of the Holy Trinity, says the International Theological Commission. At Mass, we pray that “through the mystery of this water and wine” we may “come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”
Christianity makes us this offer: “that we can, if we let God have his way, come to share in the life of Christ,” says C.S. Lewis. “Christ is the Son of God. If we share in this kind of life, we also shall be sons of God. We shall love the Father as he does and the Holy Ghost will arise in us. He came to this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind of life he has – by what I call ‘good infection.’ Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.”
To settle, or to think we can settle, for anything less is to reject God’s offer. Belief and baptism are as essential as love of neighbour.
Father Hawkswell is again teaching “The Catholic Faith in Plain English.” All the materials (video and print) are available online free of charge at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 30, “Bearing Witness: Living as a Catholic,” will be available April 11.