Francesca Goh, Instagram.

No one has ever seen God. Yet, if we love one another, God remains in us, and his love is brought to perfection in us.      1 John 4:12

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(The Archdiocese of New York celebrates the feast of the Ascension on the traditional Thursday date, Thursday 9th May 2024)

The Sunday readings leading up to the feast of Pentecost seem to present the essential, core fundamentals of our faith. And at the heart of our faith is, quite simply, true love in all its aspects. St. Augustine stated this simply and baldly: “Love and do what you will”. Because if everything we think, say and do is based on true love, then God is there, not sin, not evil, not anything which diverges from the good. And God gave us the perfect model of this in all its aspects, the Lord himself. From today’s first reading:

Beloved, if God so loved us,
we also must love one another.
No one has ever seen God.
Yet, if we love one another, God remains in us,
and his love is brought to perfection in us.

In other words, because God loved us so much God’s Son was sent to us to demonstrate that it is possible to be God-like in all things, from the very simplest to the most horrible. In Jesus we have been given the perfect example of the way we should behave in every aspect of life, no matter how challenging. As Victor Hugo states in Les Misérables (and the song from the musical), “To love another person is to see the face of God”. And, on the other hand, “the world”, as we see in today’s gospel, is the source of the opposite way of life, the life of self, greed and destruction, the domain of “the evil one” as Jesus says. And make no mistake, the evil one is just as busy today as 2000 years ago. 

But in this prayer to his Father, Jesus is quite practical: 

I do not ask that you take them out of the world
but that you keep them from the evil one.
They do not belong to the world….

So Jesus himself prays for each one of us, today, that we enjoy God’s protection from all evil (a plea which is also made in the Our Father) on our journey through this sometime vale of tears. But it is also those moments of life which are purely good, happy and spirit-building for which we should also be ready and welcoming. The world, after all, is also home to good people, not out to destroy or hurt us, but open to companionship, support and, of course, help when needed. It was at this time in the history of the early church that, years ago, a friend of mine pointed out that it was between the Ascension and the Descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, in some strange way, God was both absent and present. If you look at divine revelation over the centuries, God the Father was slowly revealed to God’s people in the pages of the Old Testament. With the arrival of Jesus, the age of God the Son came about, ending at the Ascension when Christ left us to join the Father. Then, about 10 days later, the time of God the Holy Spirit was initiated, and has remained to this day. So, for 10 or so days, there was, for want of a better term, an “interregnum” and it was at that time another man was elected to replace Judas, the betrayer of Jesus, to restore the number to twelve (today’s first reading). My friend wondered if that had taken place after the Descent of the Holy Spirit, it might have been a woman… Just a rather interesting thought. Bear in mind that in Hebrew, the word Spirit and the word Wisdom are both feminine in gender…..

Finally, and as if to eliminate any doubt about God at all, John, in his first letter, today’s second reading, states clearly and boldly that God is love. It is the only time that statement occurs in the Bible. There are many intimations of it, but nowhere else is that revelation made as boldly, even defiantly. It could be said that perhaps a major expression of this concept is to be found in the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which will be celebrated on the Friday of the third week after Pentecost. With such a burning ideal of the idea of God’s love for us, and the invitation to return it, which love always hopes for, is the summation of our relationship with the Almighty and the Almighty with us.

The Sacred Heart of Jesus, Aimee Cabo BSN’s Post.

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Reflections on next Sunday’s Mass Readings will be posted on Wednesday.

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