6th Sunday of Easter A

See Commentary on John 14:15-21 in John 14:1-15 & John 14:16-24

Homily 1 - 2005

What is today’s gospel about?  John situates Jesus’ discourse within the context of the Last Supper. He has Jesus talking around the table with his apostles before his crucifixion and glorification.  But I think the whole passage is John’s effort to give words, as it were, to the risen Christ, the Christ whom he, and his Christian community among whom he lived, were in deep relationship with.

They have had time and have checked out, as it were, their own experience, and the risen Christ somehow now in their midst is saying to them: “You will see me because I live,  and you will live... “You will understand that I am in you and you are in me...  “Anyone who loves me I shall love and show myself to... “My Father will give you the spirit of truth....”  So ... “Anyone who loves me will keep my commandments, (will treasure, as it were, my values...)  We tend, after all, to become like the one we love.  I remember my mother and father telling me as a child: “Birds of a feather flock together.”

John’s effort is a wonderful invitation to us all to try to put words around our own experience of where we stand in relation to this man who was executed two thousand years ago, but who somehow exerts unquestionable influence on us, and on millions of others like us, now, today.

I expect we could all say that we admire him – his message – it makes eminent sense to us.  We admire his consistent living out that message.  We may also admire many things about Mahatma Gandhi; Perhaps some of us admire the courageous and enlightened stand of Martin Luther King and commitment of both to change: non-violent change.  But to me, Jesus leaves them for dead: for the broad sweep of his teaching, and his total integrity, his courage, his single-mindedness, his warmth – and his presence.

Perhaps more fascinating than admiring him – we feel proud of him, proud to be his disciples.  We can live with my own deficient courage, integrity, warmth and compassion because he loves us, so he accepts us unconditionally in all our inadequacy.  Though we might feel uncomfortable about our own response to his love, we know that his heart is a big heart.

We may also have noticed that, as we have grown closer to him; we have become more understanding, wiser persons.  To the extent that we have absorbed his Spirit, we have changed for the better and grown in our humanity.  We can and do love him, and know in our bones that we are wanted by him, chosen, even that he likes us.  As that popular hymn puts it:  “Come as you are: that’s how I love you; Come as you are, feel quite at home!”  That goes for any of us here. Being chosen is not a call into an exclusive club, but is equally available to all without for a moment losing anything of the singularity of our relationship.

I think that that is what Jesus’ resurrection has made possible.  He is certainly no longer confined to a where or when – to Galilee, around the year 30 A.D.  He is alive.  He is with God,  He is with me/you.  Somehow we seem to interpenetrate.  He influences our life, our direction and our goals, our hopes, our values, what we are capable of.

Let’s listen again to how John, under the inspiration of the Spirit of truth, gives words to the risen Christ: “You will see me because I live, and you will live.  You will understand that I am in you and you are in me…  “Anyone who loves me I shall love and show myself to…  “My Father will give you the spirit of truth....  So ... “Anyone who loves me will keep my commandments.”

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!

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.

Homily 4 - 2020

Restrictions are easing but some are still with us. How seriously do we take them? This issue is being addressed, in fact, in today’s Gospel passage, taken from the Gospel according to John, that started with the observation: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”

What commandments did Jesus give us? An obvious answer is:”This is my commandment that you love one another … Love one another as I have loved you”. Can you think of any others in John’s Gospel? I can’t. In a sense the disciples didn’t need them — the historical Jesus was there on hand to ask personally if ever there was any unfamiliar moral decision they had to reach. But the matter does not end there. Jesus would soon be killed — so he would no longer be there to ask.

The Gospel passage, however, went on: “I will not leave you orphans. I will come back to you.” But there is a catch. Where do we find him? How does he communicate with us — to answer our moral questions? Let’s read on… “I shall ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you for ever,… the Spirit of Truth.” The Greek word translated as Advocate can be translated in a number of ways, depending on the context, for example, one who acts on behalf of another. The Spirit is the one who acts on behalf of the no-longer-physically-present Christ — the one through whom, as Jesus said, “I am in you .. and you in me.” So the Spirit stands in for Jesus, or is the one who connects us with Jesus and enables Jesus to communicate with us.

In the area of moral decisions, Jesus communicates with us through the Spirit by means of our conscience. And when we tune in to our conscience, we pick up the sense pretty strongly that it calls for our consent. We experience its guidance as, for lack of a better word, his commandment.

How does conscience work? Already we have some sense of a range of moral values that mattered to Jesus. The other three Gospels especially are full of them. We can become more and more aware of and personally convinced of those values if and as we mature. Conscience draws on our knowledge and appreciation of the values that mattered to Jesus, and assists us to apply them to the complex human situations that we face, where sometimes different values can even seem to conflict.

One of those basic values is that of human life. As we mature, we see other values closely tied to human life — human freedom, for example, human responsibility, human rights. We appreciate the importance of life in community if we are to live our personal lives fruitfully. The list goes on. We recognise, of course, that other people can evaluate things differently — which leads us perhaps to look more closely at what we have taken for granted.

But human life, life in community, is often complex — with values interacting all over the place. Conscience sorts them out, prioritises them, and makes the practical judgment how we are to act responsibly. Through our conscience, Jesus engages with us —enlightening us how to act responsibly in the complex details of life — if we take the time to listen.

How seriously do we take the current directions for living within the shadow of the pandemic? Jesus will direct us through our conscience, taking account of how much we value human life, our own and that of others — how much we genuinely love our neighbour. Its practical judgment will also depend on how we prioritise conflicting values: protection of life, protection of the economy. It will draw on the importance we give to acting together, to trusting our social decision makers. The list goes on. But since Jesus is engaging with us there in our conscience, it is important that we take its guidance seriously. “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”

Homily 5 - 2023

Mothers’ Day provides a good context to tease out some of the issues raised in today’s Gospel passage:

As a child of six or seven I used to sleep out on our closed-in back verandah. I remember still how, each night, before settling down to sleep, I used to call out to mum to come and tuck me in. It had to be mum. Dad would not do. And poor mum would interrupt what she was doing and come out and duly tuck me in. She would say a little home-made prayer as she tucked in the blankets — and in no time I would be off to sleep.

The word “Advocate” in today’s Gospel passage translates the greek word Paraclete. But Advocate is a somewhat functional translation that tends to miss the warmth also conveyed by the original word. A Paraclete can be one who answers the call and comes to the side of another — as mothers tend to do.

In today’s Gospel the author wrote of two paracletes. Jesus was one; and one whom he called “the Spirit of Truth” was the other one. He said of the spirit of Truth, “He is with you, he is in you”. He then said also of himself, “You are in me and I in you.” Finally, in relation to the Father, he went further, “I am in my Father and you in me and I in you”. So — not just called to the side of.., but mysteriously in-dwelling. Words here are being pushed beyond their limits.

Yet how else can we talk about realities like love, intimate love — as intimate as we can get, especially God’s love? Perhaps the best way, even only way, is to get out of our heads and use metaphor, paradox, even poetry. And John the Evangelist, the poet and mystic, is just the one to do it. His purpose in writing his Gospel was to lead his readers to ponder more deeply on their experience of the risen Jesus, their relationship with him and of its consequences for their lives of discipleship.

“You are in me and I in you”…, “He is with you, he is in you”… And, “I am in my Father and you in me and I in you”… Not just relationships, but super-relationships — not just real, but super-real!

Towards the end of today’s short passage, John has Jesus saying, “Anybody who receives my commandments and keeps them will be the one who loves me”. When Jesus speaks of commandments being“received and kept”, he is speaking of more than rules made up by himself and to be observed under threat. What he would dearly want us freely and gratefully to “receive” and treasure are the vision, the goals and the values that inspired him during his life. He wants us to experience life as he did — as he put it, “because I live, you will live”. To the extent that we love him and admire him, we will dearly want to live as he did, particularly to love one another as he has loved us.

“The Spirit of truth”… the one who puts us in touch with what is most real… who opens our eyes to a world saturated with the loving close-up presence of God… and empowers us to respond
joyfully.