5th Sunday of Easter A - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2023

I find today’s Gospel passage quite wonderful. Familiarity can always deaden us, however, to the riches it contains.

It starts with a short reflection on faith — faith as personal, as relational. John is not writing about what is spelt out objectively in the Creed, for example, or in the catechism. What John is thinking about here is trusting. Trust is relational. Essentially it involves entrusting ourselves to another. Indeed, to be able fully to entrust ourselves to another, we need not just to know but especially to love that other. Jesus wants our trusting/our believing to be a genuine, joyful encounter.

Jesus himself saw it that way in today’s Gospel passage where he spoke about his longing to take us with him, so that, as John quoted him: “Where I am, you may be too”. Do we really hear that? Jesus really want us! When he referred also to his own sense of God. He spoke of his “Father”, not simply of his God. And he talked about “My Father’s house” — where, in the culture, people felt instinctively safe, at home, truly themselves.

True faith in God and in Jesus can be fragile. Our world puts pressure on us to no longer trust confidently. The agnosticism of our present world can rattle us as well — as it has rattled so many of our friends and family. Jesus challenged us not “to let [our] hearts be troubled”. He assumed that our “hearts” were the inner repository of our trust — not our minds. He also seemed to assume that that negative pressure would be our constant experience. Trusting would be an on-going challenge, as would loving. It would involve a constant journey — just as growing involves constant changing. Whether we are explicitly aware of it or not, I think we all seek the particular meaning of our individual lives. We feel on a journey, seeking something “more” in life, something more fulfilling. Some of us may even see life as a pilgrimage.

In replying to Thomas’s question where Jesus was going, Jesus gave Thomas the wonderful assurance that: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life”. On the journey of life, Jesus insisted that he knew more than just the way he was heading — he lived the Way to get there. As they would witness in a few hours, his Way would take him in the direction of suffering!

Jesus claimed also to be the Truth — not just to know the Truth [truth is essentially what is real]. Faith will mean our willingness to take Jesus at his word; but fruitfulness will be a factor of how we have learnt to know ourselves as we really are — not what we would like to be, or what we think we should be, but what we are. God, who is sheer Reality, loves and wants us just as we are.

And then Jesus stated that he was the source of true Life — indeed its embodiment, something we all yearn for. Life is not static. We are meant to grow ever more alive as we faithfully follow the Way of Jesus across the years — allowing ourselves to keep on changing as we see more, as we appreciate more, as we grow in love and in humble, loving service of each other.

I sometimes ask myself if some Catholics, possibly even ourselves still in the Church, have simply carved out for ourselves a familiar, comfortable, predictable, static and arbitrary collection of practices and beliefs; and stubbornly resisted any call to change and to grow in any truly personal, fulfilling, even exciting, exploration of who Jesus really is.

I also find myself wondering if some who have left the Church were following what they took to be a call to greater honesty and personal integrity. We are not expert in judging ourselves. We are even less competent when we presume to judge others.