A Homily for the Second Sunday after Pentecost

+ “Do not wonder if the world hates you.” It hated Christ before you as it hates still Him, together with all those who live in Christ. St John ceaselessly taught that the one condition of living in Christ is to love the brethren. In the epistle of last Sunday, as it is used on ferias after the feast of the Trinity, is taken from the same epistle making the same fundamental argument from a different perspective. In that section of the epistle the connection with Pentecost is made explicit. “If we love one another, God abides in us, and His charity is perfected in us. In this we know that we abide in Him, and He in us; because He has given us of His Spirit.

​But why should the world hate us when all the focus is on loving our neighbour. The world does not know love because it does not know God. Conversely to the Apostle’s teaching that we can be sure we live in God and God live in us through charity, it is true that unless God lives in us there is no true charity “perfected in us” by God. This is the ‘other side of the coin’ of what the Apostle is teaching in this epistle. There can be no true faith without charity as there is no true charity without faith. Nothing could be further from this reality than the secular notion conveyed in the slogan “love is love”.

What then is it to love in deed and in truth? St John is expressly talking here in the context of giving of worldly substance to those around us as opposed to our adoration of God. Yet it is the example of the Apostles at Pentecost which fills us with the best example of exactly in what this is composed. On being filled with the Spirit of God they preached Christ Crucified to all people. There is nothing greater that we can give to our neighbour than faith which leads them to God in eternal life. This love, however, is easily met with rejection and even hate because it calls for conversion. It is a love which calls sin: sin. It is a love which knows its own sinfulness, its own weakness, yet will not hesitate to give to the other what it can to help bring the other to Christ.

Another element which the Apostle put emphasis on, moreover, is that there is no fear, there is no apprehension of what the world might do to you in response to this love. He is perfectly clear about the reason for this fearlessness. It is the live-giving self-sacrifice in union with the Cross of Christ which is the supreme exemplar of love. In that union with the one perfectly efficacious act, our acts of charity become eternally efficacious even if their temporal nature appears not to be. This is not changed by the scale of the act which is undertaken in this love. By this love the divine life burns within us, it cannot be quenched (cf. cant. 8:7). Not even death is able to destroy nor dampen that love.

It is not, however, enough to look to the cross as exemplar. We are called to partake in the sacrifice of Christ sacramentally and through a continual living of that reality. Both go together and cannot be separated. St Benedict states that it is through patience that we share in the sufferings of Christ (Rule, Prologue): a patience that characterises our perseverance unto death. Patient perseverance in the monastery, as in any state or work, does not ignore evils that approach, rather it seeks a manner to overcome them ever ready to face the next no matter how quickly or gravely it may arrive. Rather it recognises that we are soldiers of Christ, fighting with all our being to glorify Him and preach his name to all the earth.

Conversely, it recognises those things which are beyond our power to change, or which any attempt we might make to correct would result in a greater evil. Even in the face of these sufferings we should not have a stoic resignation, but rather a supernatural awareness that we have “passed from death to life” and that these present struggles are no more than transitory.

If the world hates us, it is because it does not draw from the source of life and can only succumb to the weakness and desires of mundane human pleasures, or those of those immediately around them. How gravely this contrasts with our partaking of the Cross of Christ. Sharing in the cross of Christ, through our own conversion of life and charity those around us in working for their conversion without fear of temporal repercussions is the first manner in which this love can be lived. This is the mark of the Holy Ghost living within us. + ​