Our Christian faith tells us that the Holy Spirit is the inspiration behind our Sacred Scriptures. In light of this what do you make of St. John’s vision in today’s second reading of a new “…holy city, a new Jerusalem coming down from heaven…”
Do we simply store such in the back of our consciousness, and return to the hum drum of our everyday lives without any further thought? Or are we willing to ask: what is the Holy Spirit trying to tell us here? And why during this season of celebration of the Resurrection? A recent TV Ad you may have seen uses the phrase: He gets it! Apparently, the Apostles Paul and Barnabas got it, and spent the remainder of their lives in tireless missionary activity, preaching the new creation in the Resurrected Christ, despite the fact that it was “…necessary to undergo many hardships.”
There was a time when Western Culture was imbued with Christian values. That era no longer exists. Our world is now every bit as pagan (secularist) as the world of Paul and Barnabas, and now just as much in desperate need of evangelization. As a bare minimum we are obliged to demonstrate: “ This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
Jesus doesn’t ask that we love everybody in an abstract general way, but rather the concrete “one another”… in other words, the face in front of you!