Sixth Sunday of Easter;( 25th May, 2025)

 The truth of Jesus is understood not by observing or studying it from the outside, with an objective and impersonal gaze, but by allowing ourselves to be involved in its event and in its experience. Happy Sunday!

 DOCTRINE AND FAITH 

 (Acts 15:1-2.22-29; Ps 66 (67); Rev 21:10-14.22-23; Jn 14:23-29: Sixth Sunday of Easter; 25th May, 2025)

In these Sundays of Easter Time, we are brought back, by the Gospel of John, to the events that immediately precede the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus. The liturgy seems to want to lead us not only into the Cenacle, but into our own life, to the heart of our fears, hconfusion, and disbelief. If it is true that we believe in the risen Jesus, however, we so often experience his absence and the anguish that this distance causes in our lives. This is the atmosphere of the fourteenth chapter of which we read some verses today. Two traits characterize the spiritual climate of the discourses of the Supper; It is worth dwelling briefly on them.

 

The first feature is that these discourses are set in the context of a Supper, which becomes the symbol of a profound communion between Jesus and his disciples. The environment is intimate, interpersonal. We are thus reminded of a crucial dynamic of the Christian experience: the truth of Jesus is understood not by observing or studying it from the outside, with an objective and impersonal gaze, but by allowing ourselves to be involved in its event and in its experience. We know the truth if we are willing to let our life be introduced into a path, into a journey that leads us to know the mystery from within. It lets us know the truth, in the original sense of being able to savour it, enjoy it.

The second feature is the overall climate of these texts. It is marked by what John calls the disturbance of the disciples. The chapter opens with a strong invitation from Jesus: "Do not let your hearts be troubled" (v. 1). Towards the end, in the passage we hear this Sunday, Jesus forcefully repeats: "Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid" (v. 27). Several reasons contribute to creating disturbance and fear; in fact, the disturbances and fears that threaten our human experience and our faith are reflected in them. What we are most interested in observing is how Jesus reacts to the disturbance, the way in which he invites the disciples to overcome it. First of all, there is an appeal to faith: "Have faith in God, have faith also in me" (v. 1). These words resonate at the opening of the chapter.

Then, in our verses, the call to faith is followed by the invitation to remain in love. Faith and love are the foundations of the Easter experience. In an intertwining that is never divisible: faith leads to love and love nourishes faith. In John 14, many promises of Jesus resound concerning the future of the disciples: the possibility of carrying out the works of Jesus and indeed of carrying out greater ones; the gift of praying in the name of Jesus, certain of being heard and answered; the promise of the Spirit as another Paraclete who will remain with us forever; the promise of being able to welcome and remain permanently in the love of Jesus by virtue of his word that protects us if we in turn know how to protect it. The culminating promise, however, is the one we hear this Sunday: "If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him" (v. 23). Here we really hear something surprising: the chapter opens with Jesus' promise to go and prepare a dwelling for us with his Father, but then the discourse ends by reversing the image: it will be he who makes our life a dwelling capable of hosting God's visit. "We will come to him and make our home with him." We are the ones who become God's place! Jesus prepares a place for us by making us the place, the dwelling of Trinitarian love, the temple of his glory.

 Describing the future Jerusalem, the Book of Revelation tells us that "it has no need of the sun or of the moon, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb" (Rev 21:23). We must await this future fulfillment, but savouring the way in which it is already beginning to be fulfilled in us. Our personal existence, that of our communities, is already the dwelling place of God, in which that light can dwell that offers us the possibility of seeing and judging the things of all time in a new way. We understand then how vain, foolish and senseless it is to base our faith and our salvation on external signs, such as the circumcision that the Acts tell us about (cf. Acts 15:1), or other signs that we continue to invent in our times, or on human works, such as the works of the Law. Jesus' Easter gives us much more, an incomparably more beautiful and fascinating good: to remain in his love and to allow his love to remain in us, until we become the dwelling place of God.

 

The liturgy of this Sunday does not make us read this chapter to the end. Therefore, we do not listen to the last word of Jesus: "Rise, let us go from here" (v. 31). A paradoxical word, because in fact no one gets up and Jesus continues his speech. What meaning does this invitation have then? Perhaps we can interpret it as an exhortation to get up (a verb of resurrection!) to emerge from our fears and disturbances, from our anguish and resentment... We can and must get up: while remaining in the world, we dwell elsewhere, in that love of Jesus that manifests itself mysteriously in the secret of our life.

 + John I Okoye