6th Sunday in Easter

In our first reading today, Peter comes to the revelation that “God has no favourites.” This may seem obvious to us, but at the time it went against the very grain of the Jewish worldview, who regarded themselves as the Chosen people, the favourites of God. The Old Testament is replete with examples of God’s favouritism going against the grain of our human notions of justice, fairness and the priority of the first born. The most obvious place where God’s favouritism is apparent is in God’s frequent preference of the second-born son over the first- born son. We see this in God’s preference of Abel’s sacrifice to Cain’s sacrifice, with no apparent justification for this preference. We see it also in the preference of Isaac over Ishmael, and then later with Isaac’s sons, Jacob and Esau, where Esau the eldest son is deprived of his birthright and blessing from his father Isaac through the trickery of his younger brother Jacob. Then Jacob himself, even having seen the chaos that is caused by him supplanting his brother, does it in his own family and favours Joseph – his youngest son – because he is the son of his favourite wife and true love, Rachel. God in God’s inscrutable ways seems to endorse this favouritsm and blesses Joseph with the gift of interpreting dreams and with talents that enable him to rise to the highest office in Pharoah’s court.

When one sibling is favoured over another, jealousy arises and can lead to disastrous consequences, as the stories of Cain and Abel and Joseph and his brothers illustrate. Perhaps we too in our own lives experience similar feelings of jealousy and wonder how God could be so unfair in the way that God chooses to disburse favour and talents. It would be nice to think that God has no favourites, but the experience of our lives would seem to indicate otherwise. We are ill-at-ease with a Heavenly Father who fails to deal with his children equitably. As parents and as children, we perhaps know all too well the dangers of parents picking favourites amongst their children for it does untold damage both to the children who are spurned as well as to the child who is favoured. But even though we aspire to equality as an ideal, we know that as humans we are bound to have our favourite aunts, our favourite cousins, our favourite friends and gravitate towards these people more. On the flip side, there are times that we are going to be left out of the team, not invited to a party, not included in a whatsapp group because we are not the favourites. It hurts to be left out in the cold, and so even though we may not always live up to the ideal of equality, we at least expect God to be able to fulfil this ideal.

Reflecting on the stories of the book of Genesis, the Jewish Scripture scholar, Jon Levenson, asserts that the God of Hebrew bible is not a God that we can hold to our contemporary Western ideals of justice. God in God’s sovereignty is free to show and withhold favour as God sees fit. Levenson goes even further and contends that, contrary to what liberation theologians argue, the God of the bible is not always on the side of the oppressed. This is nowhere more apparent than in the story of Sarah and Hagar. Hagar is a slave woman who bears Abraham his first son Ishmael. However as soon as Sarah has her son Isaac, God allows Sarah to eject Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness, with nothing but the clothes on their backs. God is adamant that it will be through Isaac that the promise of covenant will be fulfilled and not through Ishmael. The principle that seems to be operative in guiding God’s actions is God’s faithfulness to the covenant, rather than a universal sense of justice due to all people. The Hebrew bible does not seem to find the idea of a God who has favourites problematic at all.

How then are we to understand Peter’s exclamation “Now I understand that God has no favourites”? What is it that Peter has understood about God? As a Jew, Peter would have been raised to see all non-Jews as lesser mortals. The Jewish people as the Chosen Race were God’s favourites. The Jews believed that if pagans got circumcised and accepted the Jewish faith, they could become second class heirs of the covenant that YHWH had concluded with them. In today’s first reading when Peter sees that God has poured the Holy Spirit upon pagan people, namely Cornelius’ family, who were all pagans, Peter came to understand that God wanted all people to become part of the new family that Jesus had founded. What the nascent Church came to understand under the leadership of Peter was what the prophets had be saying for centuries before. Namely, that God’s choice of Israel was so that Israel becomes a light to the nations and the source of God’s salvation reaching to the ends of the earth. God’s favour to Israel was always meant to benefit the whole of humanity, it was never meant to keep Israel in a permanent status of religious and moral superiority to the rest of the nations on earth.

It is the same with the favour God shows to individuals by choosing them to fulfil special functions in the plan of salvation. When the angel Gabriel appears to Mary, he addresses her as one who “is highly favoured.” God’s favour is always for the purpose of the salvation of all. This is why Jesus reminds his disciples in today’s gospel that “it was not you who chose me, I chose you.” We should not make the mistake of thinking God’s favour maps directly onto God’s love, and conclude that God loves some people more than others. God loves all God’s children equally, and wishes to invite all people to the heavenly banquet. It is in this sense that we are to understand Peter’s exclamation that God has no favourites. If God shows special favour to certain people, then it is always with a view to those people then sharing that favour with others. How do we share God’s favour with others? Our Gospel today makes it very clear that the way we are to share God’s favour is by loving one another as Jesus has loved us. More than any other human being, Jesus was the recipient of God’s favour, receiving the fullness of God’s grace. Jesus did not keep this favour to himself, but shared it with all he met. As the Father has loved me so I have loved you. Jesus poured himself out in love for his disciples. If God has allowed inequalities to exist, these inequalities represent the inbreaking of God’s salvation into human history. It is like a dam bursting – the dam wall does not crumble equally at all points at once – it starts with the weakest point of the wall with a trickle, and then gradually the rest of the dam wall crumbles.

Because God has chosen to mediate God’s salvation through human history, this salvation cannot come to each human person at exactly the same historical moment, in little discrete packets of grace that are all equal. God salvation breaks into human history in unequal ways with particular favour shown to specific individuals at specific times. But this favour is always for the benefit of all people. The equalizing mechanism that then distributes this grace equally to other people is what we call love. Love is the means by which God’s grace is transferred from those who have received God’s special favour to those who may have been left out in the first instalment of God’s grace either historically, culturally or religiously. This is why God’s favour shown to the Jewish people was always destined to be shared with those of other nations and this is done through the first Jewish Christians showing love to the pagan people, like we see in today’s first reading. This is also why, we who have received God’s favour through the gift of the Christian faith must take up Christ’s command to love others as he has loved us. As Jesus says “to those to whom much has been given, much will be expected” (Lk 12:48).

Questions for reflection

1. How do I deal with God showing favour to those around me? Do I allow myself to be consumed with envy?
2. How do I deal with God showing me favour? Do I in turn share this favour with others?
3. How do I deal with being left out and overlooked? Does this inspire in me a greater desire for justice and equality?