6th Sunday of Easter
(Sunday 21st May 2017)
Spirit of Truth – (John 14:15-21)
On this Sunday of Easter as well as last Sunday and next Sunday, we read from the last discourse, the section of John’s Gospel, where Jesus, the Beloved Teacher, shares His Last Supper with His disciples. As He tells them that He is about to leave them for a time, they are afraid, uncertain what this means. The resulting dialogue around the table is a short course in the basics of our faith. It summarises much of what John’s Gospel is about. The fact of the Word made flesh and the revelation of God’s love present in Jesus. The final, ultimate sign of that love unfolds in the events of Good Friday. “There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”. In time the disciples and the early Church, which gave us this text, came to embrace these fundamental truth’s but there were many occasions where they had to cope with new problems in settings different from those good old days when Jesus walked with his disciples. In times of crisis, the fears of the disciples in the last discourse must have resonated with the first Christians. ‘How can we know the way Jesus is gone?’, ‘Couldn’t we just see the Father directly?’, ‘Why doesn’t Jesus just return and show the world that what we are proclaiming is true?’.
The last discourse is meant to reassure us some 2000 years later that in belonging to Christ, we have all that we need. Today’s selection offers us further assurance in the promise of the Spirit anticipating Pentecost. Jesus says that “I shall ask the Father and He will give you another Advocate to be with you forever, that Spirit of truth”. It is this assurance which has guided the Church down through the ages. The Spirit is with us today, to comfort us and to remind us of all that Jesus taught, even as the Church faces problems that the disciples could never have imagined.