Easter 2 (B)
St Catherine’s, Centenary Suburbs
7 April 2024
Explanatory note: The liturgy planning for this Sunday at St Catherine’s where I am presiding and preaching tomorrow has listed the NT reading actually set for next week, but I have chosen to prepare a sermon based around that passage rather than correct the arrangements at this late stage. So a week early bonus for those people not reading 1 John 3:1–3 until next Sunday!
Here we are … a week after Easter.
Just week?
In some ways last weekend seems so long ago, as everyday life has returned to its normal level like a rising tide returning to the beach.
So we are now a week into the Great Fifty Days, a week of weeks, as we move from Passover to Pentecost (Shavuot). If we have ears to hear and eyes to see, this sacred season reminds us of our Jewish roots as people of Jesus.
When I was a child, I would hear adults talk about a “month of Sundays,” but every year at Easter we are offered a week of weeks.
During these sacred seven weeks we adjust our liturgical settings. Our first reading is no longer drawn from the Old Testament. Instead we listen to stories from the Acts of the Apostles.
We also take a break from Saint Paul as we listen instead to other apostolic voices in the New Testament. This year it is 1 John, but last year it was 1 Peter and next year it will be the Book of Revelation.
Even though this is the Year of Mark, during Easter we mostly listen to Gospel readings from John. Mark does not have much to offer us at Easter time, but we follow much the same pattern in the Years of Matthew and Luke.
So our menu of Bible readings has been modified for these Great Fifty Days … and we are invited to listen to some different perspectives on living the Easter mystery in our everyday lives.
We are the children of God …
In today’s second reading, a couple of portions—just tiny serves really—from 1 John 2 and 3, we are offered an amazing assessment of what our Easter faith means. These are words that we can easily skip over, so I want us to pause and reflect on them today.
Let me read the critical first 3 verses of 1 John 3 again:
See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.
1 John 3:1–3
This remarkable paragraph says three important things:
WHO WE ARE (NOW)
WHAT WE SHALL BE (IN THE FUTURE)
HOW THAT CHANGES THE WAY WE LIVE ALREADY
During Holy Week and Easter our attention is turned to the past. Every effort is made to remember and even to re-enact, at least to some extent, the events of Jesus’ final days. Indeed every Sunday when we gather for Eucharist we “do this in remembrance of him” … we are looking back.
But this brief statement in 1 John 3 reminds us to look at ourselves in the spiritual mirror and realise that we are looking at someone who is a child of God, and to look around us in church and notice how every single person here (even that person we find rather irritating) is just as much a child of God as we are.
Being a Christian is a process of transformation, not a lifetime membership in an exclusive club.
As 1 John says, “we are not there yet.” However, we are already God’s children and the character of God should be seen with ever more clarity in ourselves and in each other.
This early Christian leader who we call, “John,” was not describing or leading a perfect Christian community. We skipped the last paragraph of 1 John 2 which talks about the pain of a split that has happened in that church. People who considered themselves holier than others had left the community and formed a separate holiness club. John was pretty angry about that. He even coins a brand new hate label for them: antichrists!
Maybe John still had some transformation work to be done in his life as well?
None of us are perfect; yet.
That transformation process is not about the familiar hallmarks of a religious life: deeper and longer prayers, increased giving to the church finances (tithing?), healing from disease, financial prosperity, happy families, peace of mind, children that still go to church, and so on.
Rather, the transformation process is about becoming more and more like God until we are the same as God.
By the time our knowledge of God is perfect—which presumably is in the next life for most of us—we shall be like God because we shall see/understand God’s true character.
Not scary at all, right?
As the text will make clear later in chapter 3, that still means compassionate generosity towards one another; but then that surely is to be more like God who treats us better than we deserve?
How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.
1John 3:17-18
Love for one another—our sisters and brothers in Christ, fellow children of God—is at the heart of this, but the larger process is profound personal transformation so that each and every person is increasingly more like God.
The practical question as I wrap us these reflections is to ask ourselves how much the activities and budget priorities of this church community are devoted to enabling that kind of radical transformation. And also to ask ourselves how much of our own personal self-improvement and well-being activities are devoted to this objective?
How different might this parish be—and may our own lives be—if we took seriously those words from 1 John 3 this morning?