Homily for Fifth Sunday of Easter 6 May 2007

Today’s Gospel takes us back to the Last Supper, when Jesus is acutely aware that the time of his earthly life is running out, and that he has still much to tell his disciples- “My little children” he says” I shall not be with you much longer”. And then, in the urgency of the hour, he sums up all that he has wanted to teach and pass on to his disciples in this one phrase “I give you a new commandment: love one another; just as I have loved you, you also must love one another”.

To understand fully what this scene is about, we have to remember that Jesus is creating a New Israel, with instead of the Twelve tribes as their basic identity, the Twelve Apostles he has chosen; he wants his followers to be a new people, and he wants them to forge a new identity. In the Apocalypse we have just heard a vision of how things might be, when all the nations of the earth come into this new identity, this new people of God which Jesus is recruiting: “I saw a new heaven and a new earth”. Actually, last week’s reading was much better: “I saw a huge number, impossible to count, of people from every nation, race, tribe and language, they were standing in front of the throne”. Sounds like St Saviour’s doesn’t it.

Now I want us to go back to think for a moment about what happened when the first Israel was formed, when the first people of God came together and received its identity. That was of course when Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt where they had been living as slaves and brought them in due course to the Promised Land. Although the vast majority of this horde of people escaping from Pharaoh’s clutches were of course the descendants of Jacob’s sons and so all one kindred, they included in fact a whole mixture of people of every sort- it says in Exodus 12:38 “a mixed multitude went with them”. To weld these ex-slaves, this whole ramshackle muddle of people into one people, was the task God gave Moses while they wandered for so many years in the Sinai- they couldn’t go straight to the freedom and the joys of the Promised Land until they had shed their slave mentality, and until they had taken on and really absorbed their new identity, as free men and women, and as the Chosen People of God, as Israel. To bind them together, as that awful hymn has it, to bind them together Moses gives them the Ten commandments- these are not just a list of do’s and don’t’s- but in fact the terms of the contract that will now bind God and his people together for always, what is sometimes called the Covenant. These ten commandments are the Magna Carta if you like of this new nation, Israel, its foundation document. Now, Hebrew is a very strange language and its verbs do not really behave in the same way we expect verbs to behave in our western languages. Instead of these commandments beginning “Do not” they could just as well be translated as “you don’t… in other words, it is quite possible to look at the ten commandments and see them not as a proscription but as a description- they are saying “you are people who don’t steal, you are people who don’t kill, you are people who don’t tell lies” and so on. And so we see in the experience of the first Israel, that this mixed multitude are forged into one people, with a new identity for them all to share, whatever their origins, by the giving to them of a founding document, a description that tells them who they are and how they are to live their lives.

Back to the Gospel! Jesus as we said before is founding a new people, and his new Israel is even more of a mixed multitude than the old was- remember the 153 fish in the net two weeks ago? All the nations of the earth are to come into the net of the Church and are to come under Jesus’s influence. And now we are all in the net, you remember I said two weeks ago the fish in the net has to be treated, has to change- well, this is what Jesus is talking about at the Last Supper in today’s Gospel. God used Moses as the one who would impart to the Israelites their identity, their new laws, the ten commandments, on which their whole identity was to be based. Now Jesus uses his Twelve apostles- well, eleven now that Judas has left them- to be the bearers of the commandment that he is giving to his new Israel, the law that will describe them, that will give them their common identity, that will define them. “I give you a new commandment, love one another….by this love you have for one another everyone will know that you are my disciples”. This commandment that our Lord gives us is to be the basis of our lives, what defines us and what keeps us in our proper relationship with him, it is our covenant, our new contract and our new identity. Our dear St Augustine, commenting on this text in fourth century Africa, says “it is a new commandment inasmuch as it strips away the old man and clothes us in the new…such love renews us: we become new men, heirs of the new testament, singers of a new song. From the whole human race all over the world it creates and gathers together a new people, the new bride of the Son of God”.

We must look closely at this gospel passage- is this our identity? Does this sound like me? I hope so, because these are our identity papers and they are supposed to be a reasonable likeness! Lord Jesus, we gather in this dear church today we come from many lands and we speak many languages- make us into your one holy people, who are united in one common language, the language of love. Amen.