Lector's Notes

 To the home page

of Lector's Notes

Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year B, May 21, 2006

Check with your parish Liturgy Committee. When the Ascension of the Lord is celebrated the following Sunday, the second reading and Gospel from the Seventh Sunday of Easter may be read on the Sixth Sunday of Easter. Click here for those readings and notes.

First reading, Acts 10:25-26, 34-35, 44-48

The Literary Background: One of the church's first struggles was to decide its scope. Was God calling the early Christians to be a sect within Judaism, or to reach further? The Acts of the Apostles has a clear opinion about this, and today's first reading dramatizes it. The episode begins earlier in Acts, Chapter 10, where both Peter and the Roman officer Cornelius have separate visions. A heavenly messenger instructs Cornelius, a good man though a pagan, to summon Peter, whom he doesn't know, to a meeting. In Peter's trance, a voice bids him eat non-kosher foods. Peter calls this unthinkable, but the voice insists that what God has purified, no one is to call unclean. Then Cornelius' messengers fetch Peter. When the Jew and the Roman meet, Peter says, "You must know that it is not proper for a Jew to associate with a Gentile, or to have any dealings with him. But God has made it clear to me that no one should call any person unclean or impure."

The Historical Situation: Acts was written for people not too unlike the people whom Acts describes. That is, the late first-century skeptical Gentile converts were surprised to find themselves drawn into a new religion with manifest roots in ancient Judaism. They had questions. So the evangelist Luke tells them the story, in his gospel and then in Acts, of their new faith's origins. The decision to yoke Jews and Gentiles together was still remarkable, so Luke shows how it was a struggle for those who had first reached the decision a generation or two earlier. Luke's goal is to burn into the hearts of the new converts the same zeal for the spread of this faith that overcame the traditional exclusivity of the first followers of Jesus.

Proclaiming It: Before you proclaim this, try to understand the astonishment of the already-Christian, ethnically Jewish characters like Peter and "the circumcised believers who had accompanied Peter." Read all of Acts, Chapter 10. They've been asked to accept that:

This is a lot for anyone to accept. You can be sure they didn't discuss it in hushed tones. Use the whole range of your voice to capture the controversy and drama. And when you say, "The circumcised believers who had accompanied Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit should have been poured out on the Gentiles," sound astounded.

Then pause. Your pause expresses the quandary of the people described, thinking "Whoa! what does this mean and where do we go from here?" After two beats, assume the confident voice of Peter, who now knows, "Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people ..."

Second Reading, 1 John 4:7-10

The Historical Situation: At the risk of wearying regular readers, Lector's Notes borrows again from the Introduction to 1 John in The New American Bible:

To the best of our knowledge, the original recipients of the first letter of John were specific Christian communities,

  1. some of whose members were advocating false doctrines (2:18f-26; 3:7).
  2. These errors are here recognized and rejected (4:4);
  3. although their advocates have left the community (2:19),
  4. the threat posed by them remains (3:11).
  5. They have refused to acknowledge that Jesus is the Christ (2:22),
  6. the Son of God (2:23)
  7. who came into the world as true man (4:2).
  8. They are difficult people to deal with,
  9. claiming special knowledge of God
  10. but disregarding the divine commandments (2:4),
  11. particularly the commandment of love of neighbor (4:8),
  12. and refusing to accept faith in Christ as the source of sanctification (1:6; 2:6-9).
  13. Thus they are denying the redemptive value of Jesus' death (5:6).

The inspired writer, of course, wants to ease the pains caused by these rifts, and assure his readers that the saving truth is open to them and clear.
Examining the verses of the reading in this light, we notice:
Beloved, let us love one another,
because love is of God;
everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God.
Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love.
This insistence on the primacy of love could be the writer's response to points 10 and 11 in the indictment of the heretics.
In this way the love of God was revealed to us:
God sent his only Son into the world
so that we might have life through him.
 The heretics claimed special knowledge of the things of God (item 9, above). The writer refutes them by stating that the important things of God were revealed by the public presence in the world of God's Son. This refutes them on point 6, also.
In this is love:
not that we have loved God, but that he loved us
and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.
 Here the heretics get their comeuppance on point 13.

Proclaiming It: These staccato sentences are packed with meaning. The meaning may be lost on your hearers if you proclaim it too quickly.

To prepare for the proclamation, you might write the reading out, one sentence at a time, one sentence under another. Pretend your paper is a classroom blackboard, and you're presenting a proof to an algebra class. You make one declaration at a time, each building on the previous. Finally, you present your inescapable conclusion with a great flourish.

That's how this reading should sound to the congregation. Whether you make it sound so or not, the logical flow of the reading will escape many of your listeners. But if you're reading slowly and deliberately, the fragments of the reading that are free-standing gems will have a chance to sink in, too.

Several other commentaries on these passages. All are thoughtful, all quite readable, from the scholarly to the popular.
Links may be incomplete more than a few weeks before the "due date."
Lutheran pastor and college teacher Dan Nelson's notes for a study group
Dan covers Acts 10:44-48 this week, and the same gospel passage, John 15:9-17, that Catholics proclaim today. For his discussion of 1 John 4:7-21, which includes today's second reading in the Catholic liturgy, see Dan's page for last Sunday.
Commentary by Fr. Francis X. Cleary, SJ, from 2003, from the website of the Saint Louis Review.

Father Roger Karban's column from 2003. (The headline says the column is about the Sixth Sunday "of the Year," but it's about the readings for the Sixth Sunday of Easter.)

The Text This Week; links to homilies, art works, movies and other resources on the week's scripture themes Saint Louis University's excellent Sunday liturgy site.

(Caveat lector as of May 3, 2006. Lector's Notes' author is speculating about the exact URL of SLU's May 21 offering, since it's not yet posted. If you get a 404 Not Found, try here).

The Lectionary selections in the frame at the left, if any, are there for your convenience. The publishers of the page in that frame have no connection, except for membership in the one Body of Christ, with the publisher of this page. Likewise the publishers of the pages on the links above.

Return to Lector's notes home page

Send email to the author.

Last modified: Wed May 3 17:58:29 CDT 2006