Reflection on the Gospel Reading for the 6th Sunday in Easter    May 25, 2014

The Gospel reading is John 14:15-21. Jesus said, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. "I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them."

Reflections: As noted by today's homilist, “love” for St. John is not emotional, but moral. It is not so much something we feel as what we do, how we live.

In the gospel passage, Jesus promises his disciples, “I will not leave you orphaned.” Jesus will send them an Advocate to accompany and strengthen them after he has gone. Absent from them physically, he will yet be present with them through the Holy Spirit.

Sometimes we sense the presence of Christ. At those times, we believe we will always feel him near. Like the disciples, perhaps we think that our strength and wellbeing depends on this feeling. But the sense of divine presence is not in fact ours—it is grace. And grace is not a thing to be possessed. As Jesus tells us in John 4, “The Spirit blows where it will.” Life with God is not static; it is open-ended; it is a journey through mysterious territory.

And journey is one of the primary biblical metaphors for our lives. In fact, it is an ancient Hebrew image rooted in Old Testament tradition and language. The Hebrew verb for live and walk is the same, suggesting that living and having faith are not two things; the faithful life is dynamic. Abraham (and Enoch and . . .) “walked” with God.

We, on the other hand, were raised in a cultural atmosphere in which “faith” is pictured in static terms. We focus on what we believe, not on how we live. Quite a difference from life/faith we see that in Jesus teachings time and again. But there is a ready model to help us develop a dynamic understanding of our faith.

Our lives are easily pictured as a journey (birth to death, youth to old age, innocence to knowledge to wisdom). As we grow, new capacities unfold, interests develop, insights emerge. Our personalities mature. And now science is uncovering the importance of learning lifelong.

It is the same with our inner lives. Faith in Jesus is not a static thing we possess, but an evolving relationship. We do not possess and control a faith-object; we explore a relationship with the Divine, who leads us into Mystery.

But sometimes we find ourselves in the position of the disciples—facing the unthinkable loss of the most important relationship in their lives. We, too, come to times when we may feel nothing; we mourn the loss of emotional satisfaction, the consolation of a sense of closeness. We may even fear that God has abandoned us. We might experience the temptation to keep trying to drum up the old feelings, or to give up in despair.

But real as it may feel, God never abandons us. At times we may be blissfully blinded by positive emotions or thoughts, but they are only phenomena, crutches; they are not God. It’s a bit like people in love. For real, deep love to mature, we have to grow out the satisfying feelings of being in love. Christ tells his disciples that it is for them that he goes away, so that he can send them the Spirit, the mysterious companion who will “be in” them.

In place of fear that we are losing God or being abandoned by God, we are called to entrust ourselves to God (that is the root meaning of “believe”). Christ isn’t chastising us for not being good enough; instead, he is calling us deeper. When the obvious fades, we are being invited to discover a richer and more intimate relationship than we can currently imagine.