Pentecost Sunday - Homily 7

Homily 7 - 2023

I find today’s Reading from St John’s Gospel so continually enlightening that it keeps on surprising me. It was Easter night, the end of the event-filled day of Jesus’ Resurrection, and the doors of the room where a sundry group of Jesus’ former disciples had gathered were closed.

John added the conclusion that the reason they were closed was because the disciples were fearful — probably of the Roman military who had already arrested and summarily executed their leader Jesus. I wonder if there was more, too, than fear filling their hearts. I wonder if they also felt guilty for having abandoned Jesus under pressure; and now found themselves regretting their cowardice, unable to anything about it, and feeling harshly critical and rejecting of themselves.

The passage continued: “Jesus came and stood among them. He said to them, ‘Peace be with you’, and showed them his hands and his side.” The greeting Jesus used would have been “Shalom”, a Jewish word that no language can really translate satisfactorily. It does mean “peace”, but it also contains so much more: overtones of contentment, fulfilment, and much else. Not content with wishing it once, Jesus repeated his greeting again — so much did he want to convince them of his sheer good-will towards them. This was prior to their having a chance to say anything at all beforehand, certainly no word of sorrow or regret or apology. He had obviously forgiven them — quite gratuitously, and clearly because of his wonderful goodness, not theirs.

Then Jesus added: “As the Father sent me, so am I sending you”.

What was the mission entrusted to Jesus by his Father? In an earlier chapter the Gospel had stated: “God loved the world so much … God sent his only Son into the world not to condemn the world, but so that through him the world might be saved.” God deeply desired to save people from the destructive, even violent, ways that they regularly used in so many of their interactions with each other.

Jesus prefaced his mission by assuring people that God loved them. He lived that way of love himself. He consistently instructed people to deliberately choose God’s way of love with everyone, insisting there was no other way to find peace in the world and to save the world from itself. He had shown his utter conviction of the non-negotiability of the choice for love by his deliberate acceptance of death by crucifixion. He would never draw back from what he had so obviously believed.

It was on this same mission that Jesus now sent his disciples. Their mission would resemble a new re-creation of the world. Just as then, God had breathed into Adam’s nostrils the breath of life, so now Jesus “breathed on” the disciples, saying , “Receive the Holy Spirit”.

Finally, Jesus instructed his disciples, “For those whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven …”. The new creation, the second start toward a truly saved world, would prioritise God’s Way, Jesus’ Way, of unconditional forgiveness — the unmistakable, universal acid-test of gratuitous, universal love that Jesus had just personally exhibited.

Fortunately, an alternative preferable translation can be made of the last words of today’s reading, “… for those whose sins you retain, they are retained”. Thank goodness! because nowhere in John’s, or in any of the Gospels, is there an occasion where Jesus is shown to retain anyone’s sins. Rather, in line with Jesus’ remark that “…the sheep that belong to me listen to my voice… They will never be lost, and no one will ever steal them from me”, today’s concluding passage can be translated quite naturally as, “…Whomever you hold fast, they are held fast.”

The Church is called to be a reliable haven for struggling pilgrim-disciples in a still sin-prone world.