6th Sunday of Easter A - Homily 2

Homily 2 – 2008 

I would like to reflect this morning on that last sentence in today’s Gospel: Anybody who receives my commandments and keeps them (and he had given only one so far in the Gospel, which was: “Love one another as I have loved you”), will be one who loves me, and anybody who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I shall love him and show myself to him.  Jesus was talking about those who made the choice for love the guiding principle of their lives – a conscious, deliberate choice.

Living it out doesn’t happen over night.  Instinctively we prioritise the second best, and focus more on ourselves: our security, and our relative standing, our comfort and the easier options, distraction and what we call “fun”, our popularity rating, and our concern not to fall behind our peers in the things we own.  Those attractions are the influences on us that the Gospel called the world: the world can never receive (the Spirit of truth), because it neither sees nor knows him. Those influences confuse us.  They blind us to the way things really hang together.  They get us running in a thousand directions, and leave us with the feeling of having got nowhere.

But we can turn things around; and God’s Spirit (what Jesus calls the Spirit of truth) helps us to do just that: to face the truth, to see through the illusions that society (of which we are part) and consumerism and one-up-man-ship are all built on.  If only we stop, we begin to see where true growth, peace, and happiness lie.  It’s letting go seeing others as “them”, as competitors, threats, or critics, and, instead, simply noticing what and how they are … and leaving things at that, and choosing to accept them as they are, without needing to see them as “against us”, or needing to change them, or comparing them to ourselves.

Under the influence of the Spirit of truth, we begin simply to live. As Jesus said: because I live, you also will live.  “I have faced into death; I let go of everything, but I’m alive!  You can be the same: You also will live.”  That, ultimately, it seems to me, is what we want: we want to live, and not just in “the sweet-bye-and-bye”, but now.

Jesus offers us the possibility of being totally caught up in love: Anybody who receives my commandments and keeps them will be one who loves me, and anybody who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I shall love him and show myself to him.  This we know on faith – because he has told us.  It might not be our experience, even after years of faithfulness.  But then, if we can stop thinking we know what being loved by God should feel like, we may find that, deep, deep down, we are beginning to know not just that it is, but what it is.  And that is my hope for us all!