"If we desire to receive the gifts of the Spirit we must pray to the Father, through his Son, that the Spirit may descend into us and remain with us, driving out the darkness of this world and enlightening our minds and hearts."
Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter (A)
We have just listened to a passage from the Gospel according to St John. It was a very short passage – and yet, at the same time, it was an extraordinary passage. It was extraordinary because it is so densely constructed that it cries out for careful explanation.
Many of you will be aware that this passage is part of Jesus’ answer to Philip when Philip says, ‘Lord, show us the Father and then we shall be satisfied’. This is an audacious request because the writings of what we call the Old Testament had repeatedly make it plain that no one can see Almighty God and live. We see this, for example, in the experience of Moses on Mount Sinai and the experience of Elijah on Mount Horeb. Yet here is Jesus telling us that when we love him we love his Father – and he makes it plain that we can love Him in this life. The normality of our human desire to know and love God is beautifully expressed by Augustine of Hippo in a famous passage in the Confessions, ‘You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts have no rest until they rest in you’; but at the same time we have to admit that it is impossible to love someone we do not know. It is necessary to ask ourselves, therefore, how it is possible to know Jesus for this will open the door for us to love Him and so love His Father, the omnipotent, omniscient, God who made all things out of nought and who holds us and all creation in being.
In this short Gospel passage of some six verses we notice that Jesus says, ‘If you love me you will keep my commandments’ twice. We remember that elsewhere Jesus tells us that there are just two commandments: ‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind ... and ...You must love your neighbour as yourself’ (Matt 22.37-38). All the other commands of the Jewish Law, flow from these two commands. Please keep this idea in mind whilst we turn to the next statement of Jesus.
Jesus says, ‘I will not leave you orphans; I will come back to you. In a short time the world will no longer see me; but you will see me, because I live and you will live. On that day you will understand that I am in my Father and you in me and I in you.’ As men and women who live some 2000 years after the death, and resurrection, and ascension of Jesus we know that we will not see Jesus in the flesh as his first disciples saw him. We cannot touch him and hear him and smell him as they could. And yet Jesus said and continues to say, ‘I will not leave you orphans; I will come back to you’. What does this mean?
Are we to take it that this simply refers to the Eucharist which we are going to celebrate in obedience to another of Jesus’ commands? We certainly believe that we receive the Body and Blood of Jesus when we come to Holy Communion. Is this what Jesus is talking about when he says, ‘I will come back to you’? This is doubtless part of the answer – but, extraordinary though it is to be able to receive into ourselves the Body and Blood of our Saviour so that His flesh and blood become part of our very being, I do not think that is a wholly satisfying explanation.
Is it, then, something to do with encountering Jesus in the Gospel? It is true that we do encounter Jesus in the words of the Gospel but these words need to become a living, breathing, word. Let us view this saying, ‘I will not leave you orphans; I will come back to you’ in another way, with the eyes of St Paul.
You will remember that Paul tells us that his conversion was marked by Jesus saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’ (Acts 9.5 & Acts 22.7). Paul was, in fact, persecuting the members of the Church. Jesus identifies the suffering members of the Church with himself. Paul’s experience marks him in two ways. First, he understands the Church as the Body of Christ; something we find stated most clearly in the twelfth chapter of the first letter to the Corinthians. Second he understands that the human encounter with the Church is a normal way in which Christian men and women experience the living Lord Jesus in every time and place.
If we place these ideas together we can infer that we are not orphans, we are not deserted by Christ, because we can still see Christ, with the eyes of faith, in the members of the Church, especially the suffering members of the Church. Indeed we can go further and say that we can see, and touch, and heal Christ in all suffering humanity – provided that we have eyes that see and ears that can hear, eyes and ears which have been sensitised by the gift of faith.
Thus we can say that loving Jesus Christ means that not only must we obey Jesus’ command to ‘do this in memory of me’ at the Eucharist but we must also love Him by following His command to care for our brothers and sisters in their times of need; for our brothers and sisters in need are, in very truth, the suffering Lord Jesus present in our midst today.
I have emphasised that we see Christ in our brothers and sisters in need when we see with the eyes of faith. It is important, therefore, to ask how we are to acquire the faith that gives us eyes to see and ears to hear as the Lord desires that we should? Jesus says, ‘I shall ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you for ever, that Spirit of Truth whom the world can never receive since it neither sees nor knows him.’ Faith is a gift of God given to us by the Spirit. If we desire to receive the gifts of the Spirit we must pray to the Father, through his Son, that the Spirit may descend into us and remain with us, driving out the darkness of this world and enlightening our minds and hearts. Thus it is truly fitting in these last days of Paschaltide to pray for the coming of the Spirit into our minds and hearts at Pentecost so that the Easter mystery may come to completion within us.
Abbot Cuthbert Madden OSB