The Sixth Sunday of Easter Year B

The Sixth Sunday of Easter

Acts 10.44-48
1 John 5.1-6
John 15.9-17

‘His commandments are not burdensome.’ Hard to take, that, in a world where all commandments are burdensome, where anybody telling anyone else what to do – even God telling his creatures what to do – is felt as an imposition, a belittling or patronizing attempt to keep people down.

But John, let alone Jesus, won’t let us get away with that. Loving God means keeping his commandments; and the greatest commandment is love. Circular? Maybe, but not viciously so. The upward widening spiral of Christian commitment uproots us from the swampy ground of the romantic movement, where everything that is not generated by our own ‘feelings’ is somehow ‘inauthentic’, and replants us in the firm soil of God’s conquest of ‘the world’. This is where the vine can grow best, and where its branches can bear fruit that will last. This is where prayer to the Father in the name of the Son will surely be answered...

Taken from Twelve Months of Sundays Year B by N T Wright