God's Spirit Will Remain with God's People

Homily for the Sixth Sunday in Eastertide

Your best friend is leaving town. There is no way to change things, it is certain. You are filled with sorrow. You will miss him or her. What do you do with your sorrow? This is the scene we find in the Gospel for the Sixth Sunday of Easter. Jesus is trying to comfort the disciples because he is moving, not just to a different town; he is about to move away from the world and into the Father’s arms. Sounds like what we experience at a funeral. We are truly glad that our beloved no longer has the pains and shortages of this life. But what about us? We who are left behind do not get our burden lifted; we get more added to it. We are lonely for the one who has gone away.

After his death and resurrection, Jesus could not stay on earth and be just like he was before. As he tells them, he must go to the Father. “If you loved me you would rejoice.” He had told the disciples something more, and it is puzzling. “Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid. I am going away and I will come back to you.” Going away but coming back? This sounds like the previous three days when he was dead and then alive again. How can this be?

In order to come to some understanding, let us look at the world before Jesus came among us.  God the Father had been with the chosen people for eons. The Hebrew Scriptures remind us of this over and over again. God made covenants with them - first with Noah, then with Abraham, and finally with Moses. However, there was still so much about God that the chosen people did not understand. There was some important information missing.

Why did God seem to get angry when they were not faithful? Why does God tell Moses to look at him only after he had passed the cleft in the rock where Moses stood? After God rescued them from the slavery of the Egyptians, why did God let the Assyrians destroy their nation and take them into slavery again? God was supposedly with the people, but often God seemed to be missing.

To close this gap in their understanding, God decides to send his Son to the world to completely reveal who God was in a way human beings could understand. He speaks his very self to us, and he uses a Word that leaves nothing lacking. Humanity is the language, and Jesus is the Word spoken in that language. Now God can be known insofar as we know Jesus because chose to be one of us.

Jesus dies, rises, and finally ascends to the Father from whom he came. Are we abandoned? No. Just as the Father had done when Jesus was sent, Jesus then spoke out his own very self in another Word that leaves nothing of himself unsaid – the Holy Spirit.

John’s Gospel says it is a Word that is with God, and that the Word is God. It is the interior Spirit of a human being called Jesus, who is already the very interior Spirit of God. We are to be closer to Jesus and to the Father than the apostles were!

If you and I say yes to the Holy Spirit, we will know Jesus, the one who took on our flesh, just as sheep knew the voice of their shepherd. In knowing him we will know the Father. We will be side by side with the closest presence of the God of love that is possible. We find Jesus in the Great Sacrament, the Mass, in God’s Word, and in the people around us.

Jesus tells us he wants us to be filled with joy, and that this joy must be complete. However, it will not be complete until he returns to the world and permanently establishes God’s Kingdom. This new kingdom was seen by John of Patmos – the new Jerusalem. It is founded on the apostles and is accessible through gates that bear the names of the tribes of Israel. These gates point north, south, east, and west. In other words, God’s Kingdom is available to all people no matter where they come from, what language they speak, or what color their skin. As we hear in the first reading today, the Gentiles will join the Chosen People. God will be among the people; God will be Emmanuel and will never leave us again. Consequently, it is necessary for us to live by the light that illuminates the New Jerusalem, the light that is the Lamb who sits on the throne, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.