I want to start today by going back to that first reading, from the Acts of the Apostles. Peter has been approached by a Roman centurion named Cornelius, whose whole family wants to be baptized and join the Christian community. It’s hard for us to imagine how completely impossible this must have seemed to these first Christians, all of whom still saw themselves as Jewish, all of whom assumed that the point of Jesus’s life was that he had been one of them, and that the community was meant for people like them. The reading says that they were astounded to see the Holy Spirit acting this way on a family of non-Jews, but the word astounded is actually closer to meaning that they went out of their minds when they saw it. And yet here is Peter, who somehow realizes in the middle of this that yes, this is where God is acting, the Holy Spirit can do whatever God wants, and what God wants for his people now after the resurrection has no barriers.
How is it that Peter became the kind of person who could be this way? I think it’s possible that what we are seeing here is that Peter after the resurrection of Jesus finally understood how the love of God had worked in his own life. Here was someone who had denied Christ three times, seen Christ led away to death with Peter left behind without being forgiven, who failed multiple times to be the leader he was supposed to be, but then, the world for Peter was reborn in the resurrection. He realized that his imperfections no longer separated him from the love of Christ, that love now could never be taken from him. And so he became the kind of person who had the strength to say to a total outsider, stand up, he says to Cornelius who has bowed down before him, I am a human being like you, loved by God exactly in the same way you are.
It can take us our whole lives to learn that God doesn’t love in the ways that human beings do, choosing some more than others, demanding life-long perfection, loving mainly the people who are most like ourselves, worried about who deserves how much. That’s the way humans tend to do it, but today’s readings are all about another way to see what love is. And what they tell us is that it is first in our own lives that we are going to need to realize what Peter learned, that God does not hold love back.
If we have any love, St. John says today, it’s going to be because we see that God loved us first, and because we feel in our hearts that that love is unconditional, that we did not deserve it, but we have it, that we are loved as we are. God accepts us over and over, forgiving and understanding our failure and our imperfection and our past, asking us to stand up on our feet and feel that we are accepted.
And because God loved us first, what would not have been possible before is now possible. We realize that everyone is supposed to experience that love. Human barriers between people are never from God, they are always of our making. Redeemed people like Peter, and like us, are here to see these barriers for what they are and to take them down.
This all isn’t easy to realize, and yet if we’re going to be at all like Peter in this reading, it starts with us seeing that God really does love us beyond our understanding, doesn’t just tolerate us from a distance, or love people in general, but loves us, much more than we probably love and accept ourselves. He loved us first, and continues to. And then today’s gospel says, it’s simple, love as you have been loved, without anywhere where you draw the line about where to stop.