The River of God is Full of Water
“You allowed men to ride over our heads; we went through fire and water; but you brought us out into a place of plenty.”
Contemporary Russian artist Elena Igorevna Cherkasova produces rich ink miniatures that draw their inspiration from the tradition of illuminated manuscripts, as well as the classic iconography of the Christian East. Her depiction, here, of the Sermon on the Mount intersects seasonally and thematically with this weeks’ lessons. In these final weeks of the Easter season, we are ushered into the Upper Room to sit at Jesus’s feet and receive his most intimate teaching. While the Sermon on the Mount points in the other direction — towards Jesus’s public wisdom, rather than the discourse saved for his closest friends — Cherkasova gestures to the richness and abundance of Jesus’s teaching, and the pleromic effect that emanates through his followers — not just to all people, but to all creation.
By this we know love: that he laid down his life for us. So we too should love one another.
— The Beloved Apostle John (1 Jn 3:16)
Fifth Sunday of Easter
Texts for This Week
Prayer
Almighty God, whom truly to know is everlasting life: Grant us so perfectly to know your Son Jesus Christ to be the way, the truth, and the life, that we may steadfastly follow his steps in the way that leads to eternal glory; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
The Greatest Commandment
The Porter’s Gate here offers a modern ballad, weaving together the Great Commandment to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and soul and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself,” with a prayerful appropriation what Jesus gives us as the mark of a true disciple in John 13:35 — that we love one another. It is a theme that echoes with this week’s Scriptures; for instance, the Apostle John’s line, “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the the brothers and sisters” (1Jn 3:14).
