Sixth Sunday of Easter 2010

Homily for Sixth Sunday of Easter 9 May 2010

Today’s Gospel is taken from the long discourse that John recounts Jesus as having with his disciples during the Last Supper, where the emphasis is again and again on love- the disciples are above all to be people who love. In fact last week we heard Jesus say that that must be the defining characteristic of his followers from now on – “by this love you have for one another, everyone will know that you are my disciples” – that is why he says “I give you a new commandment, love one another just as I have loved you”.
Jesus of course when he says this has just given the disciples a vivid example of what he means by love when he washes their feet: love is to be above all about service to others, and our love to be worthy of the name must show itself in practical ways, we must be of use, of help, to those we love. That is how we shall show that we love God- by loving our fellow human beings, doing good to those around us, and trying, insofar as we are able, to live life by the rules, by the teachings of Our Lord as they are mediated to us in every generation by his Church. This is what Jesus means when he says “if anyone loves me he will keep my word” and “those who do not love me do not keep my words”. And then, because Our Lord knows how frail and half-hearted we so often are when it comes to trying to please him and do the right thing, he tells the disciples that they are not going to have to go it alone, because the Holy Spirit will be sent to them at Pentecost to strengthen them, the Holy Spirit who “will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you”.
That is the key to the Christian life isn’t it, the Holy Spirit, given to us in our baptism and living within us to keep us always in close contact with God and to keep prompting us to make that contact day by day in a thousand ways, suggesting to us that we could do this or that, say this or that, helpful thing to the people in our lives, putting the idea into our heads to go into a church and say a prayer, to come to Mass, to start having a few thoughts about our next confession. We see in the creation stories in Genesis the great truth that man is created for intimacy with God, that friendship with God is our destiny, and that this is achieved by God giving us his Spirit. We read in Genesis 2 that when he had created Adam God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and he became a living being”. Breath and Spirit are the same word in Hebrew, ruach, and here we see the human race coming alive, coming alive to its true destiny and to all its potential, with the gift of Holy Spirit activating it.
But Jesus says another, quite extraordinary, thing in this gospel reading today. He describes the Christian life, this intimacy with God that we are all called to, in the most moving way when he says that when we live in love, God will come to us in the closest possible way, we shall have the Holy Trinity living in us- “we shall come to him and make our home with him”. This is the vocation of every Christian, to have the Trinity dwelling within us, living in us and acting through us, making us part of the divine life of the Godhead, caught up in the eternal momentum of love that is God’s nature. The Greek word for home that John uses is “mone” the same word in fact that occurs a bit earlier on, when Jesus says “in my Father’s house there are many “monai”, many rooms, many dwelling places. So the word that Jesus uses to describe Heaven is the word he uses to describe our life when it is lived with God in us, a sort of Heaven on earth.
There is a French Carmelite you may know, a near contemporary of her more famous sister Ste Thérèse, Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity. She too died in her early twenties, she too left behind a body of writings that have carried her influence far and wide from her Carmel of Dijon. On her first communion day a nun explained to her that her name Elisabeth meant “House of God” and she loved to think of herself from an early age as just that, God’s little house where he is at home and where he can do as he likes. Just before she died she wrote to her mother “You can believe my doctrine for it is not my own”- she developed her spirituality that the Christian has the Holy Trinity –“my Three” as she affectionately calls them- living in him from Scripture, especially these words of Our Lord in today’s Gospel. Of course how comfortable the Trinity is living in us will depend on us, on how much room we are willing to let God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit have (that’s three bedrooms for a start), how open we are prepared to be to the command to love. The more we let God have of our lives, the more he will fill our lives. It’s up to us. The greatest Carmelite of all perhaps is St Teresa of Avila; she reminds us that “Christ does not force our will, he only takes what we will give him, but he does not give himself entirely until he sees that we yield ourselves entirely to him”.
So there is God, the Creator of the Universe, waiting to see what we will spare him, if we will risk a little loving and in so doing let him into a corner of our lives, let him come in and rent a room- or maybe give him a long lease on the whole property. Up to us! Jesus, we love you, we will keep your word; come to us at this Mass, come Father Son and Holy Spirit and make your home in each one of us, live in us and make us your dwellings, your little bits of Heaven, the channels of your love in our broken world. Amen.