6th Sunday of Easter A - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2014

The Beloved Disciple had possibly known the physical Jesus for three to five years. But by the time he wrote his Gospel thirty to forty years later, their time together had become past history. Certainly the Jesus whom he wrote about in his Gospel was the Jesus he had known in the flesh; but more importantly he was the one he had come to know even better over those intervening thirty to forty years. The words he put into the mouth of Jesus at the end of today’s passage express that experience well: those who love me … I will love them and will reveal myself to them. That had been precisely the Beloved Disciple’s experience – and it may not be all that different from our own.

To really know another well, we need to love them. That is non-negotiable. It also helps to know that they love us, too. But there is more. If we take care to mature across life [and that does not happen automatically], our capacity to love and to know another grows imperceptibly but powerfully. I do not know about you, but I know that that has been the case with me. I am still getting to know Jesus; and it keeps on getting more satisfying. I notice also that my knowing him better seems to run parallel with my getting to know and accept myself better.

In today's passage the Beloved Disciple had Jesus promising to give us what he called another Advocate, whom he also called the Spirit of truth. Advocate refers to a person who takes the side of another… More importantly, it is one who affirms and empowers people to grow, to develop and to become more and more truly themselves. 

The original Advocate was the historical Jesus whom the Beloved Disciple had known and who had had such an amazingly positive impact on him. He no doubt remembered how Jesus had helped him feel more alive when they had been together so long ago. Yet, during the years that had passed since Jesus’ death, the Disciple had come to experience this other Advocate who had continued the process begun by Jesus. 

The problem that many of us face is that deep down we struggle to believe how amazing each of us is. We may even struggle to believe that anyone could really love us if they knew what we were really like. There are a lot of people around who make us feel that way – and we do the same to them. People instinctively judge and categorise others – good/bad, right/wrong, like us/not like us, with us/against us, and so on. Sadly, we do the same to ourselves: we constantly judge ourselves.

Over the years, the Beloved Disciple had noticed another voice inside himself that did not categorise, judge or put him down – a voice that kept insisting that he was loved, loved by God, loved unconditionally. And he had come increasingly to accept that that was true. Across time he had come to recognise that voice as the voice of the other Advocate, the Spirit of truth. At first, like most others in the world from which he came, he did not see him nor know him – but gradually things had changed. He had come to discover, despite his persistent fears, that God was the one whom Jesus called his Father, not his Judge; and he had learnt to see himself in Jesus, who was in turn in the Father, and to be drawn into the wonderful dance of infinite Love that is the life of the Trinity.

The experience of the Beloved Disciple can be our experience. The Advocate, the Spirit of truth, is still at work. The quietly insistent voice can be heard; and over the last two thousand years has lost nothing of its power. But, like the Beloved Disciple himself, we need to discipline ourselves to create the stillness and silence in which the Advocate’s voice can be heard, the loving God encountered, and life can blossom.