SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER C

[cappie]

We are still in the Easter season but John’s gospel takes us back before the Easter event as we hear another part of the farewell spoken by Jesus before his death.   We listen as Jesus teaches the disciples about what will happen after he leaves them. God will send an advocate, the Holy Spirit, who will do two things: teach and remind.

Jesus seeks to give his disciples hope in the face of what is to come. Of course, they don’t know what’s coming, but at this moment he says to them that, if they love him, they will keep his word and Jesus and ‘my Father’ will make their home with them. 

It’s quite breathtaking, revealing to us an intimacy we’re unexpectedly invited to share in. And that home is being made whenever we are present to one another, not using one another, or fantasising about one another, but are able to be with each other.

The Spirit will teach us how God desires and gives us the good things we need, even when we don’t know what they are or how to ask for them. A man named Mark started coming to church because his business was failing. He couldn’t separate the business failure from his feeling that he was a failure as well. In a short while, people who had been strangers began to talk to him, sit and drink coffee with him, and one older woman who owned a small business offered to help him develop a business plan. In less than a year, his business began to show a profit. In a practical way, he was taught how God loved him and desired good things for him and gave him the guidance and wisdom he needed.

The Spirit will also remind us, especially when things are not going well, what really matters and to whom we belong. The faith community is the place where we are restored, not in just a feel-good way, but in the depths of our hearts. The sign of the cross, the breaking of the bread at communion, the hymns (read the words even if you don’t sing), and the Scriptures are all reminders of how much we are loved and cherished and redeemed. As a wise bishop once said, “Human beings solve problems; God redeems messes.” All of us think we can fix things, but often messes overwhelm us. We are reminded, as the disciples were after the death of Jesus, that God redeems messes – and that includes each of us.

Good things have been turned into a commodity. They are scarce, and you have to be able to pay for them. At least that is what we are told by ads and even stories in the news. Go to this doctor or lawyer, get treated at this cancer center, buy this or that appliance for comfort in your home – the list is endless – and expensive.

God has another way that is based on abundance. God gives us what we need, always providing for us those things which cannot be bought or bargained for. They are things that endure, such as hope, faith, love, fellowship, and friends. They are qualities like peace and wisdom and courage. God gives us these gifts through the Spirit, and God also gives the ability to find them in others. The world is full of them, though often they are masked by our focus on the news of anger and darkness.

 Often, we prefer to hold tight to what we know because letting go seems risky. But that’s what Jesus is speaking of: trusting in God’s love, this peace, as revealed in him and made real in our lives by the Holy Spirit. This is the intimacy we’re invited to share in, where ‘on the far side of my letting go is myself in God’. 

It’s the vision revealed to us in the second reading from the Apocalypse where ‘the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb were themselves the Temple’ and we live in them, opening our hearts in praise, as in the psalm. It reminds us that, empowered by the Holy Spirit, there will be decisions to be made, and work to do, to enable the Good News of God’s love to be heard. 

But now, in the light of Easter, we know, as do the disciples in the first reading, nothing can prevent God making a home with us.

When you are discouraged or feeling alone, remember, sometimes we are given experiences that remind us of how dependent we are on the risen Lord, His Holy Spirit and the Church.