Homily for the 6th Sunday of Easter, A

Instead of talking about Jesus from the outside, in what we have heard and seen, Jesus is inviting us to meet him in a new way. What Jesus was and said is not past, but present, and everything speaks to us from deep within. Jesus is talking about love taking shape within our lives.

I have Mass at St. Isidore on Sunday, May 10th at 7:30/9:30 am

The 7:30 am Mass will be live-streamed. https://stisidore.church/worship-online/

frjoedailey@gmail.com

Transcript

a reading from the Holy Gospel according to John. 

Jesus said to his disciples, If you love me, you will keep my commandments, and I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot accept, because it neither sees nor knows him. But you know him, because he remains with you and will be in you. 

I will not leave you orphans. I will come to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me, because I live and you will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I in you. Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me. And whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him. 

The Gospel of the Lord. 

Jesus' words of farewell in today's Gospel begin, If you love me, you will keep my commandments. It almost sounds as if Jesus were saying, If you really love me, prove it. But let's consider this from another angle. All of us know the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew's Gospel, with its magnificent commands. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Do not judge and you will not be judged. Do not worry about your life. In everything, do to others as you would have them do to you. But John does not include a single one of these words in his gospel. 

In John's gospel, Jesus gives us a new commandment, love one another as I have loved you. Everything else is commentary. Instead of talking about Jesus from the outside and what we have heard and seen, Jesus is inviting us to meet him in a new way. What Jesus was and said is not past, but present, and everything speaks to us from deep within. Jesus is talking about love taking shape within our lives. 

All the words Jesus said or could have said or must have said will come to us from within, as if they were our own. We begin to speak about Jesus not as an historical person, but as a power that floods us, utterly invisible, but strong as the air we breathe and the light whose warmth we feel and the twinkling of the stars that lights us in the darkness. Spirit is the word we use for this because we have no other. 

The Spirit is drawing us into the life of God, the life that humanity was created for, abundant life, eternal life, resurrection life. The Spirit brings us home to God. Maybe that is the deeper opposite of being orphaned, being gathered back into communion with God. Because I live, Jesus says, you also will live. That is Easter in a single sentence. Because Christ lives, his presence is still reaching us, not trapped in the past, not only someone we read about. 

By the Spirit, Jesus does not become a memory. Christ is present in us, closer than the air we breathe. Love can still grow in us. Faith can still breathe. We are not orphans, but people who are sheltered and given a home in the Spirit, people who love and are therefore mediators between heaven and earth, between the stars and the dust of the streets, the highest and the lowest. 

We are people who live in tension between heaven and earth, loving in our longing and filled with happiness on the way to an eternal home, while we ourselves are already dwellings of eternity. 

I read a recent article in the Christian Century by Stephanie Saldaña, who lives in Bethlehem with her husband, a Syriac Catholic priest, and her two daughters. Stephanie writes, In the beginning of the Bible, God speaks the world into being. It's not surprising, then, that language is tied to how we see God at work in our lives. But, she continues, I'd never considered how bound up languages in our ability to have hope during what feel like hopeless times. She was writing at Christmas about the impact the war in the West Bank has had on their small Christian community. She ended with what she thought was a hopeful note. Christmas would still come, even if the war returned. Bethlehem is the city where Jesus was born. 

She asked her husband to look at the text, and when he reached the end, he asked, Have you considered writing the last sentence in the present tense? Bethlehem is the city where Jesus is born. It's a small change, but hearing it, she said, rustled something within me. I became aware that I had fallen into despair over the years of war. I needed to examine the grammar of my faith, to meet God in the present tense again. 

The liturgy is always about the present tense, with Christ truly present in the Eucharist, as well as in the gathered body. We sing, Christ is born in Bethlehem, for unto us a child is born, and in this season Christ is risen. 

There's the danger of living in two tenses, one for Sundays and one for the rest of our lives. Hope came in the present tense of the verb to be. Hope calls us back to the present tense, yet staying here requires an openness to seeing God present and available among the laundry and the dishes and war and bread here and now. 

Remaining present is communal work, as 1 Peter urges us, always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope. We are all entrusted with calling one another back to the present. Give us this day our daily bread. 

A Jesuit friend told her that the image that helped him during the war was of the friends lowering their paralyzed companion through the roof to meet Jesus. We carry one another back to the here and now. If we can hold on to it, this knowledge that God is truly present becomes the very ground of our being.