5th Sunday Easter - Year C

This Sunday, as we continue our look back at our beginnings, we are reminded that the quality and character by which we are to be known and identified as Jesus’ own is the love that we have for one another.  Love compelled Paul and Barnabas (Acts 14:21-27, first reading) to persevere in carrying the message of salvation to as many places and people as possible.  Love is the atmosphere that pervades the Seer’s vision (Rev. 21:1-5, second reading) of the new Jerusalem wherein the presence of God, who is Love, obviates all suffering, sorrow and pain.  In today’s gospel (Jn 13:31-33, 34-35), Jesus makes it clear that truly authentic Christian love must be more than mere words; love must become a way of life.

In order to affirm the absolute necessity of genuine love for living an authentically Christian life, Anglican Canon William Barcus, in an address delivered to a Nashville, TN, audience (1988), cited a 1944 photo essay published in Life magazine.  The subject of the essay was the red foxes of Holmes County, Ohio.  One Saturday about 600 men and women and their children got together and formed a big circle, five miles across.  They all carried sticks and started walking into the woods and fields, yelling and baying to frighten the foxes out of their lairs.  Inside this diminishing circle, the foxes ran to and fro, tired and frightened. A number of them were killed on the spot.  Finally as the circle grew smaller and smaller, down to a few yards, the remaining foxes went to the centre and lay down, for they didn’t know what else to do.  But the men and women knew what to do.  They hit these dying wounded with their clubs until they were dead.

While his listeners dried their eyes, wet with sympathy, Barcus continued “I stand before you today, as one weary of running, as one wounded myself” (Barcus was suffering from AIDS and all the surrounding stigma).

“My people are being destroyed, and your people and all our people together… not only by an illness like AIDS but by a darker illness called hatred…  The Christ, Jesus, the compassionate Lord of Life and Lord of more forgiveness and Lord of more hope is the one we have vowed to follow and be ultimately guided by.  Sadly, too many of these sick have wondered if they had any alternative but to go to the centre of the circle and lie down and die.  Where are you in the circle?  Where are we?  Where would Christ be?”