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+BUT YOU KNOW HIM, BECAUSE HE REMAINS WITH YOU AND WILL BE IN
YOU — 6th
Sunday after Easter
These words from the gospel today about the Holy Spirit give us a theme for
these final days before the Ascension and the feast of Pentecost. They are
particularly appropriate as the community of Gethsemani prepares for an abbatial
election this coming Tuesday. These words take us to a quiet place in our lives,
into our hearts where the Spirit of God is at work. They are from the final
discourse of Jesus with his disciple just before he entered into his passion and
death. They open our eyes to his inner life, into what was to carry him through
the most crucial and momentous hours the following day. Let me suggest they can
also reveal to us where we are to draw on a tremendous inner strength as
Christians and monks.
This section of Christ’s farewell discourse is inserted between two parallel
declarations, his saying: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” and
then at the end of our text his saying, “whoever has my commandments and
observes them is the one who loves me.” Jesus seems to indicate that this
keeping of his commandments is the only reliable criterion for our love of him,
so much so that he repeats it no less than six times during his final discourse.
But then, we may begin asking ourselves, what “commands” is he talking about?
And were we to put together all his sayings where he says “do this” and “don’t
do that” in the hope of knowing just what these commands are, not only would we
be reducing the gospel to a set of obligations but we would be led into a
misunderstanding both of its spirit and letter. The Gospels seek to take us into
a far more engaging, demanding and vulnerable experience, into the realization
that God is giving us no less than Jesus himself as our rule of life. They seek
to open our hearts to the gift of a Divine love that seeks to permeate the whole
of our lives.
For me this is the meaning of Jesus saying to his disciples that he “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,” a Spirit to remain with us, that
will be in us. It is only in the Holy Spirit that we can know the truth, that we
can carry out his commands as they become manifest daily to us. Of ourselves we
can neither perceive the commandment of God, nor carry it out in the unfolding
of the varied circumstances and the unique differences of each of our lives. But
with the Holy Spirit at the center and source of our thoughts and actions, a
fresh and living consistency encompasses our every undertaking. By pulling us
into the life of the Spirit, Jesus gives authenticity to the whole of our lives,
makes them one with his own.
As we read the Gospels, Jesus comes across as living under continually changing
demands on his time and energy. And isn’t this where many of us find ourselves.
He is at the marriage feast of Cana, on the mountainside proclaiming the
beatitudes, healing a countless number of sick and those oppressed by evil
spirits. He is reaching out to the poor, training his disciples by both word and
example, confronting the religious authorities of his time, pardoning sins,
feeding thousands by a multiplication of bread and fish. He does all this out of
an abiding sense of his Father’s will. What he does in today’s gospel is invite
each and all of us into his own relationship with the Father, into his own
intimacy and oneness with God. He was about to depart this world so that the
world will no longer see him. But we are to see him, know the experiential truth
that because he lives, we also live, even to knowing that as he is in the
Father, we are in him and he in us.
It is here that our Christian and monastic lives are renewed afresh each day. It
is here that we “sanctify Christ as Lord in our hearts.” The reason for our hope
in Christ has no need of being imposed on others, our lives will convey it “with
gentleness and reverence.” Nothing is so influential and effective in our world
than the example of authentic love, however hidden it may be. We see Philip
presented as the perfect example of this in the first reading. As he proclaimed
the Christ “unclean spirits, crying out in a loud voice came out of many
possessed people, and many paralyzed or crippled people were cured” so there was
great joy in that city.
Allowing ourselves to enter into the inner sanctum of our own hearts where
Christ pours out his Spirit within us, we are empowered to live to the full our
Christian lives. It is from here that we will make all the right choices in our
lives however demanding they may be. It is from here that Jesus truly becomes
“our way, our truth and our life.” And it is here that we experience the truth
of those words of St Augustine, that in our participation and reception of the
Eucharist, Christ is not absorbed into us but we into Christ Michael Casagram, OCSO
Abbey of Gethsemani
27 April 2008
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