Homily Easter 5 Sunday 9th May, 2010.
Chapters fourteen, fifteen, sixteen and seventeen of John’s Gospel are frequently referred to as the Farewell Discourses. They are chapters full of warmth, tenderness and hope. They express the intimacy between Jesus and His Father, an intimacy into which He wishes to invite us, which He wishes to share with us; an intimacy that we were created to participate in.
Jesus is speaking out of the depths of His heart, out of the depths of His relationship with God. He is speaking here in these chapters out of His centre. He has returned to His centre because everything around Him is falling apart. You would imagine that these words, containing such hope and confidence, were spoken in a context of complete peace and security, but they weren’t. The chapter immediately preceding the one from which today’s reading comes ends with the words: “I tell you before the cock crows you will have disowned me three times.” Chapter thirteen contains the betrayal and the false promises of Peter, and Jesus’ desperate sorrow hidden in the words: “You will all run away and leave me alone, yet I am not alone, the Father is with me.” Crisis can take us to our depths. Yet in the midst of this Jesus tells His disciples not to be troubled or afraid. He invites them not to fear even their own cowardice. He invites them not to be scared. Is this because things aren’t scary? No, but because He is with them. It’s as if He wants to say: “I have been where you are and worse places. I have lived and endured and conquered the worst that can be done to you.” This is what he says to you now. “In the world you will have trouble, but do not be afraid, I have overcome the world.”
The peace Jesus gives to us isn’t so much the peace of tranquillity but the peace of the assurance of victory. When He offers rest to those whom He invites to come to Him because their lives are burdensome and troublesome, He’s not speaking of relaxation but freedom, conquest. Even in the midst of strife He offers a peace deeper than all else.
We are made many offers of peace in our daily lives, and within our culture. If we are stressed or troubled or anxious many things are presented to us as peacemakers from a beer can to cocaine. What we are offered isn’t peace in fact but distraction, temporary relief – a momentary aside. Jesus offers, He says, what the world cannot offer, that which is lasting, that which is of an eternal nature. “The peace I give is a peace the world cannot give.” It’s also a peace the world cannot extinguish unless we let it. He offers Himself to be our home. He offers to make me a home for Himself and His Father.
The pre-requisite for receiving all of this, He says, is to keep His word. “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.” What does it means to keep His word? It means to trust what He says, even though everything else makes little sense and is apparently falling into chaos. And the most important word is that we were created for greatness, despite what we may be feeling or seeing within and around us. “I have come that you might have life and have it to the full.” We were created to be the home of God. Jesus reveals to us that God’s vision of us is enormous, huge. He created us to be His home. He created each one of us uniquely to be the home of that community of love and intimacy and joy and celebration and delight that we refer to as the Holy Trinity. The love and beauty expressed in their interpersonal intimacy He wants for us. He wants it to be the corner stone of our lives. “Don’t be worried or afraid,” He says. This is your fundamental truth – keep it, trust it, live from it. That is His word to you this morning. He speaks this now to you. In listening to the gospel read at Mass we hear the living word of the Living Word who is Christ.
Last Good Friday I wrote a letter and I made a thousand copies of it and I went out, like the postman, to offer it to people in the street. “I have a letter for you,” I said. It was a short note about Good Friday, its meaning for us and especially referring to the Goodness of the day as a proclamation of the ultimate victory of love over evil. I walked around the town for about four to five hours and when in Market Street I offered the letter to one young guy who, because of my habit, refused it and said he was an atheist who didn’t believe in all the God rubbish. “How can there be a God if the world is as it is. Look at all the damage religion has done and is still doing.” We’re familiar with the arguments. So I say to him:
“Oh that’s great, I don’t often have the opportunity of meeting an atheist, thanks. Tell me what you don’t believe in.”
“Well all these fairy stories you tell people about your God.”
“What God, tell me who this God is for you, the God I believe in and that you cannot.”
Well I could see that the God he was convinced I believed in I would never believe in either. Everything he said was about how awful the world was, and how terrible the country was and people’s lives were. While he was in full flow about the horribleness of everything I interrupted him and said; “Excuse me, but you yourself, however, are simply fantastic. You, yourself, are extraordinarily beautiful. There has never been anyone like you in the entire history of the human species, never will be. Even if you had an identical twin you wouldn’t occupy the same bodily space. You’re utterly unique. Now I suspect there is love behind that. I don’t believe your uniquely unrepeatable beauty is accidental. I don’t believe you are an accident going nowhere.” He took a letter then anyway!
“If anyone loves me he will keep my word” – anyone. It’s a big inclusive word - anyone. Everyone was created to house the beauty of God in an utterly unique way, and express that in an utterly unique manner. So when God looks at each one of us He does so with a vision of limitless possibility. This is why jealousy is so pointless – wanting what others have, looking how others look, doing what others do. Each one of us, as Paul writes in one of his letters, is God’s work of art. A work of art is a creation into which the artist has placed him or herself. Pope John XXIII introduces his autobiography, ‘Journal of a Soul’ with a few words on the opening page: “My soul is in these pages.” That is what God says of you – “My soul is in this creature.” “This is my home – our home – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit live here.” “Let us create man in our own image.” Always we must remember that God, as our faith teaches us, isn’t simply some remote individual but a community of intimate love and delight. This is the word Jesus wants us to keep; this encouragement, this trust, and this benevolence.
Our lives may be difficult, we may be living at the moment with many frustrations, many disappointments, hurts, memories, betrayals, feelings of loneliness and abandonment, as did Jesus on that last night of the supper, when He opened His heart and soul to those who were in fact of the verge of deserting Him. But all our frustrations are in fact passing. All our pains are temporary, and as Paul writes, nothing compared to the joy that will one day be revealed. “Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid,” not because life isn’t hard sometimes but because of Jesus’ promise to return to us in the Spirit with His Father. In the context of that intimacy with us, that belief in us, that solidarity with us, what are our troubles? This is what Jesus means when He invites our troublesome lives to Himself, and invites us to take up His burden: “Come to me you who labour and are over-burdened….my load is easy and my burden is light. Take my yoke upon you.” He means take my promise seriously, “Keep my word,” He says. Your life at this moment, however it may be, however it may feel, is a home with a front door with His Name on it, with their Names on it. Jesus rebuilt this home with His own hands, with blood on them. Do you think He’s going to let that go? No, never. He’s happy to live there in His Spirit with His Father. That truth we must both keep and live by.
May God bless you and I on that journey of faith.
Chapters fourteen, fifteen, sixteen and seventeen of John’s Gospel are frequently referred to as the Farewell Discourses. They are chapters full of warmth, tenderness and hope. They express the intimacy between Jesus and His Father, an intimacy into which He wishes to invite us, which He wishes to share with us; an intimacy that we were created to participate in.
Jesus is speaking out of the depths of His heart, out of the depths of His relationship with God. He is speaking here in these chapters out of His centre. He has returned to His centre because everything around Him is falling apart. You would imagine that these words, containing such hope and confidence, were spoken in a context of complete peace and security, but they weren’t. The chapter immediately preceding the one from which today’s reading comes ends with the words: “I tell you before the cock crows you will have disowned me three times.” Chapter thirteen contains the betrayal and the false promises of Peter, and Jesus’ desperate sorrow hidden in the words: “You will all run away and leave me alone, yet I am not alone, the Father is with me.” Crisis can take us to our depths. Yet in the midst of this Jesus tells His disciples not to be troubled or afraid. He invites them not to fear even their own cowardice. He invites them not to be scared. Is this because things aren’t scary? No, but because He is with them. It’s as if He wants to say: “I have been where you are and worse places. I have lived and endured and conquered the worst that can be done to you.” This is what he says to you now. “In the world you will have trouble, but do not be afraid, I have overcome the world.”
The peace Jesus gives to us isn’t so much the peace of tranquillity but the peace of the assurance of victory. When He offers rest to those whom He invites to come to Him because their lives are burdensome and troublesome, He’s not speaking of relaxation but freedom, conquest. Even in the midst of strife He offers a peace deeper than all else.
We are made many offers of peace in our daily lives, and within our culture. If we are stressed or troubled or anxious many things are presented to us as peacemakers from a beer can to cocaine. What we are offered isn’t peace in fact but distraction, temporary relief – a momentary aside. Jesus offers, He says, what the world cannot offer, that which is lasting, that which is of an eternal nature. “The peace I give is a peace the world cannot give.” It’s also a peace the world cannot extinguish unless we let it. He offers Himself to be our home. He offers to make me a home for Himself and His Father.
The pre-requisite for receiving all of this, He says, is to keep His word. “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.” What does it means to keep His word? It means to trust what He says, even though everything else makes little sense and is apparently falling into chaos. And the most important word is that we were created for greatness, despite what we may be feeling or seeing within and around us. “I have come that you might have life and have it to the full.” We were created to be the home of God. Jesus reveals to us that God’s vision of us is enormous, huge. He created us to be His home. He created each one of us uniquely to be the home of that community of love and intimacy and joy and celebration and delight that we refer to as the Holy Trinity. The love and beauty expressed in their interpersonal intimacy He wants for us. He wants it to be the corner stone of our lives. “Don’t be worried or afraid,” He says. This is your fundamental truth – keep it, trust it, live from it. That is His word to you this morning. He speaks this now to you. In listening to the gospel read at Mass we hear the living word of the Living Word who is Christ.
Last Good Friday I wrote a letter and I made a thousand copies of it and I went out, like the postman, to offer it to people in the street. “I have a letter for you,” I said. It was a short note about Good Friday, its meaning for us and especially referring to the Goodness of the day as a proclamation of the ultimate victory of love over evil. I walked around the town for about four to five hours and when in Market Street I offered the letter to one young guy who, because of my habit, refused it and said he was an atheist who didn’t believe in all the God rubbish. “How can there be a God if the world is as it is. Look at all the damage religion has done and is still doing.” We’re familiar with the arguments. So I say to him:
“Oh that’s great, I don’t often have the opportunity of meeting an atheist, thanks. Tell me what you don’t believe in.”
“Well all these fairy stories you tell people about your God.”
“What God, tell me who this God is for you, the God I believe in and that you cannot.”
Well I could see that the God he was convinced I believed in I would never believe in either. Everything he said was about how awful the world was, and how terrible the country was and people’s lives were. While he was in full flow about the horribleness of everything I interrupted him and said; “Excuse me, but you yourself, however, are simply fantastic. You, yourself, are extraordinarily beautiful. There has never been anyone like you in the entire history of the human species, never will be. Even if you had an identical twin you wouldn’t occupy the same bodily space. You’re utterly unique. Now I suspect there is love behind that. I don’t believe your uniquely unrepeatable beauty is accidental. I don’t believe you are an accident going nowhere.” He took a letter then anyway!
“If anyone loves me he will keep my word” – anyone. It’s a big inclusive word - anyone. Everyone was created to house the beauty of God in an utterly unique way, and express that in an utterly unique manner. So when God looks at each one of us He does so with a vision of limitless possibility. This is why jealousy is so pointless – wanting what others have, looking how others look, doing what others do. Each one of us, as Paul writes in one of his letters, is God’s work of art. A work of art is a creation into which the artist has placed him or herself. Pope John XXIII introduces his autobiography, ‘Journal of a Soul’ with a few words on the opening page: “My soul is in these pages.” That is what God says of you – “My soul is in this creature.” “This is my home – our home – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit live here.” “Let us create man in our own image.” Always we must remember that God, as our faith teaches us, isn’t simply some remote individual but a community of intimate love and delight. This is the word Jesus wants us to keep; this encouragement, this trust, and this benevolence.
Our lives may be difficult, we may be living at the moment with many frustrations, many disappointments, hurts, memories, betrayals, feelings of loneliness and abandonment, as did Jesus on that last night of the supper, when He opened His heart and soul to those who were in fact of the verge of deserting Him. But all our frustrations are in fact passing. All our pains are temporary, and as Paul writes, nothing compared to the joy that will one day be revealed. “Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid,” not because life isn’t hard sometimes but because of Jesus’ promise to return to us in the Spirit with His Father. In the context of that intimacy with us, that belief in us, that solidarity with us, what are our troubles? This is what Jesus means when He invites our troublesome lives to Himself, and invites us to take up His burden: “Come to me you who labour and are over-burdened….my load is easy and my burden is light. Take my yoke upon you.” He means take my promise seriously, “Keep my word,” He says. Your life at this moment, however it may be, however it may feel, is a home with a front door with His Name on it, with their Names on it. Jesus rebuilt this home with His own hands, with blood on them. Do you think He’s going to let that go? No, never. He’s happy to live there in His Spirit with His Father. That truth we must both keep and live by.
May God bless you and I on that journey of faith.
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