In today’s Gospel we hear Jesus’ ‘farewell discourse’ with his disciples. Jesus knew that his departure would be a tremendous trial for them, thus when the hour had come for him to pass from this world to the Father, he spoke to them at length about the situation in which they would find themselves. This first ‘farewell discourse,’ the third part of which we read today, reveals that this time would contain many new works of God.
Jesus’ time on earth was very brief; only a small number of people knew him then. How could this short visit of our God incarnate be seen as the realization of the promises of God’s abiding presence, symbolized by the magnificent temple built by Solomon.
(1 Kings 8:10-13), promised by the prophet along with the rebuilding of Jerusalem after the Exile (Isa 60)? Didn’t the Lord’s departure crush all hope of seeing the advent of the long-awaited liberator, as the two disciples of Emmaus sorrowfully exclaimed on the evening of Easter. ‘Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?’ John the Baptists question must have haunted the disciples from the moment Jesus said to them: ‘My children, I will be with you only a little while longer.’ We of course have the benefit of hindsight and know the answers to many of the questions posed by the disciples at the time. But on the other hand, what is left for us? Regret —for not having known the Lord as a companion, but only in obscurity and solitude of faith, waiting for his return?
‘If anyone loves me he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we shall come to him and make our home with him.’ How astounding this news is, even surpassing the hopes that Jesus’ departure seemed to undermine! No-one could ever have imagined such intimacy with the Father and his Son: both of them dwelling in each one of us! Jesus spent only a little time among us, but in that time, he taught us the Father’s word and passed on to us the assurance of his love, as well as the knowledge of how to respond to it. Loving the Lord and keeping his word are the same thing: Is he not the Word of God? To receive the word is to receive the Father and the Son, since it testifies to their presence. Jesus, however, did not say everything: his human state and the limits of time would not have permitted it. Not to mention the evangelists would have been hard pressed to report everything that he did say and do. But on his return to the Father, the Lord sent the Holy Spirit to be the disciples’ advocate and inner guide: ‘He will teach you everything and remind you of all that [I] told you.’ The Spirit is the Church’s memory; even so, we must understand in what sense this is so. It was not given only to those to whom Jesus spoke at the Last Supper, at the hour when he was to pass from this world to his Father. Its action in them was not only a reminding of forgotten sayings. The Gospels twice speak explicitly about the disciples remembering, well after an event, some saying of Jesus or Scripture. At the Lord’s entry into Jerusalem ‘six days before the Passover,’ ‘his disciples did not understand’ the meaning of the event, ‘but when Jesus had been glorified they remembered’ what Scripture had said: ‘Fear no more, O daughter of Zion; see your King comes, seated upon an ass’s colt.’And they understood that this prophecy of Zechariah (9:9) was speaking of the Lord. Again after his threefold denial, ‘Peter remembered the word that Jesus had spoken: ‘before the cock crows you will deny me three times.’’ The recollection of this saying made him conscious of his fault and led to his repentance: ‘He went out and began to weep bitterly.’ But there are countless instances in the Gospels and the apostolic writings where the Spirit brought to mind a scriptural text or one of Jesus’ sayings. In their light, the meaning of Jesus’ deeds, the events of his life, his other sayings, what happens in the Church and what it determines to do appears in full light. Thus, the Holy Spirit is even today ‘the memory of the Church,’ not that it always repeats what was said and learned before, but because it teaches us to act in conformity with Scripture and the Lord’s teaching in our own time. The Spirit is the heart and soul of the Church’s living tradition. It pushes it forward, giving it the courage and audacity needed to confront new situations, to seek and find bold solutions, drawing on its memory of the living Word.
Jesus then said to his disciples: ‘Peace I bequeath to you, my own peace I give you….’ From one end of the world to the other, the word ‘peace’ expresses the first and foremost human longing. Alas, this peace finds countless obstacles in its path! (As the people of the Ukraine are experiencing at the moment as well as those in the Holy land, and India and Pakistan). But the Lord says: ‘Not as the world gives do I give it to you.’ It comes from on high. It is the peace that reconciles all people with God; a peace that the leaps and bounds of history, trials and persecutions, war and death cannot touch. This is the supreme good that recapitulates all the gifts of the messianic era. ‘Peace’ is the first word the risen Lord spoke to his disciples. Assured of this peace, fruit of the Lord’s Passover and gift of the Spirit, the disciples have nothing to fear; rather, they should rejoice. Christ has freely and knowingly, in sadness and in agony, confronted wrongful persecution and death. But he emerged victorious. This must never be forgotten, especially when everything seems lost. ‘I am going away and I will come back to you.’ Saint John Henry Newman had this to say:
‘This is the great promise of the Gospel, that the Lord of all things, who had appeared outwardly to his disciples, would come to dwell in their hearts. Such was, as we ought to remember, the language commonly used by the prophets. And it was also used by our Saviour when he came upon the earth: ‘I will love him,’ he said, speaking of the man who loves and obeys him, ‘and reveal myself to him…….We will come to him and make our home with him’.
Although the Lord was incarnate to the point of being able to be seen and touched, this was still not enough. He was exterior and separated. But after his ascension, he descended again through and in his Spirit, and then the promise was finally fulfilled. He came into the souls of those who would believe and, by taking possession of them, he who was unique united them as one.
By becoming incarnate, Christ provided an exterior and seeming unity, the sort that existed under the Law. He gathered his apostles into a visible society. But when he came again in the person of his Spirit, he made them one in a real sense, and not only in name. Thus, Christ came, not to make them one, but to die for them. The Spirit has come to make us one in the One who died and was resurrected, that is, to form his Church.’ (Parochial and plain sermons)
Ever since the beginning, when sin appeared to have ruined the work of creation and brought God’s design to an abrupt end, salvation history has known, in each of its stages, crises that seem to threaten everything. But each time, there was a new beginning: life rose up from death, the dry bones that filled the barren plain came to life, and a whole people rose up to go, at the Lord’s command, into the desert, which had blossomed (Ezek 37:1-14)
When God sent his Son into the world, those who recognized him as the expected Saviour, promised by Scripture, were ecstatic with hope. Their liberator had finally come. He would lead his people out of the interminable and taxing cycle of the dark years, which followed a time of grace lost through a relapse into sin. He had proclaimed: ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ God’s decisive intervention was therefore imminent: what could the hostility of some people matter when Jesus’ sovereignty appeared greater after every encounter, ‘a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people’? (Luke 24:19)So the disciples were mortified when, on an evening full of foreboding, he announced his departure. True, he added that an advocate would be sent to them, that God would come to dwell among them and that Jesus himself would be definitely present in their midst. The meaning of these mysterious words passed on by the evangelist did not take long to appear to the apostles. Thereafter, it never ceased being unfolded under the wondering eye of successive Christian generations.
From Jerusalem, the good news spread farther and farther. Under the impulse of the Spirit, the Church, sometimes following lively debates, opened more and more to all cultures and, today, to all languages, even in the liturgy. Very recently, it was thought that the Spirit had said that only the language used for centuries in the Church of Rome should be used in the liturgy everywhere in the West. At the Vatican Council II, the pope and the college of bishops ‘decreed in the Holy Spirit’ not to lay obligations on Christians that do not come from the Spirit, though they may be the customary practice. And under the Spirit’s impulse, the Church is working definitively toward the inculturation of the Gospel. Truly, the one whom the Father has sent in the name of the Lord is, as in the early days, at work in the world and in the Church. The glory of God and the light whose source is the lamb do not yet shine as resplendently as they will. But the Spirit proclaims: ‘Be joyful and thankful. Take heart!’
‘Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.’
