Today’s readings: Acts 10, 25-26.34-35.44-48; 1 John 4, 7-10; John 15, 9-17.

We’ve come quite a long way since Easter Sunday, deepening the mean­ing for us of that event. The gospel today sets higher standards for Christian living, calling for more depth in our faith commitment: “A man can have no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends”. We all treasure our lives and laying down one’s life is always risky. Yet it pays. It ultimately guarantees complete joy.

When mediocrity creeps in, it can be a deadly virus. When the feeling is that it is more of the same, that is the beginning of the end. The reme­dy against this virus is setting higher standards. As we read in The Cloud of Unknowing, “God is a desert to be entered and loved, never an object to be grasped or understood”. Just as much as spirituality is about finding God, it is about creating empty spaces within the heart.

As John writes in today’s gospel, when we come to realise that what counts most is “not our love for God, but God’s love for us”, there has to be a radical change of perspective in the way we perceive things. In today’s gospel Jesus addresses friends, not servants, “because a servant does not know his master’s business”.

Unfortunately we remain locked up in a frame of mind that still gives priority to law and order, that still treats people as servants, or even worse as little children, and which still arrogantly monopolies God’s spirit. Little do we give heed to the experience of the early Church when, as we read from Acts today, “The Holy Spirit came down on all the listeners”. The spirit was poured out on listeners, not exclusively on teachers. It was poured without distinction between pagans and Jews.

Put simply, there are basically two images of the Church that have been alternating between themselves in time since the apostolic age: a Church that evangelises, which is a Church that comes out of itself and reaches out to geographical and existential peripheries; and a Church that settles down, is self-complacent, living within itself, of itself and for itself. A Church that, as Pope Francis warns, becomes self-referential and simply gets sick. This leads the Church, in the Pope’s own words, to a kind of theological narcissism.

These options are not modern-day inventions, but the Church since its inception has always been faced with such clear choices. As we read today from Acts, it took Peter and his Church quite some time to realise the truth that the spirit cannot be monopolised. It took us very long to let go of our Euro-centrism in our understanding of Christianity.

The Church today is called to take seriously the principle that the early Church Fathers stated as they witnessed strengths in Greek and Ro­man culture: that each culture al­ready contains “seeds of the Word” that help prepare it for the explicit proclamation of Christ’s message.

Fifty years after Vatican II, the Church is still struggling to come to terms with a world Church, a Church that is no longer European. Now we all realise that what was in the first place needed to start realising this concretely was a non-European pope. It was so simple. And now that we have him, we are finding it so difficult to catch up with his frame of mind and to let the spirit finally reinvent his Church.

Announcing the extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy, the Pope writes: “Mercy is the very foundation of the Church’s life. All of her pastoral activity should be caught up in the tenderness she makes present to believers; nothing in her preaching and in her witness to the world can be lacking in mercy. The Church’s very credibility is seen in how she shows merciful and compassionate love.”

John writes: “Anyone who fails to love can never have known God.” True love is that love which leaves us restless. Those who don’t create their own freedom choose to live with things as they are, limiting themselves to what is on offer. They are prisoners of themselves.

In her autobiography Hind’s Feet on High Places Hannah Hurnard writes about this freedom. It is a journey to high places of one who deci­ded to flee the valley of humiliation and venture to high places. The pouring out of the spirit gives us the freedom not to live with things as they are, but to dream how they should be.

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