6th Sunday of Easter 2023
Acts 8: 5-8, 14-17; 1Peter 3: 15-18; John 14: 15-21
I don’t know about you, but today’s Gospel leaves my head in a bit of a spin. “The world will no longer see me but you will see me.” “I live and you will live,” “I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”
Hang on a minute, Lord. Just slow down: let us take this in. The world no longer sees Jesus, but we do. How? I can understand that the world no longer sees Jesus: it has almost forgotten His name, except as an expletive, and I notice that any written mention of God tends to avoid a capital letter, as if to reduce God to a concept not to be taken seriously. How though do we see Him?
We see Him, do we not, in the experiences of life? In the painful experiences, which show us the suffering, the wounded Christ; but also in the joyful experiences which speak to us of His resurrection. We understand that these are not random events, but that He is present within them, granting us a share, however small, in His Passion, death and resurrection.
He is there to be seen in beauty, and especially in the beauty of creation; whilst His wounds may be recognised again in the suffering and groaning of the earth, as St. Paul points out in his letter to the Christians at Rome. Perhaps most clearly, though, He is to be found in human beings, created in the image and likeness of God, who show us the face of Christ, sometimes joyful, often suffering, occasionally transfigured in glory. Only the eyes of faith can see Jesus, but He is there to be seen.
“I live, and you will live” He adds. Jesus lives in the gathering of His people, in His word proclaimed, in the sacraments, and particularly the sacrament of His Body and Blood. In all of these, we encounter Him, and they are life-giving for us—yes, even those people who form, with us, His body, and in whom His face may be as difficult to recognise as the lines, faded by time, would have been in that beautiful and truth-expressing legend of Veronica’s towel, carrying the imprint of His face.
“You will understand that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” That can sound almost like a country dance, where people are constantly advancing and retreating, intermingling and moving on. Again, we need to pause a little and reflect on it.
Elsewhere in St. John’s Gospel, Our Lord is quoted as saying “If you make my word your home, you will indeed be my disciples” (8:31), and in His farewell discourse at the Last Supper, from which today’s Gospel is taken, He goes on almost immediately to say “My Father will love them, and we shall come to them, and make our home with them” (14:23). Later He adds (15:1-8) “Make your home in me, as I make mine in you”.
As I mentioned when the first of these statements was read on Monday, we have an echo of the Greek concept of the “guest-friend”, the xenos (the same word means both “host” and “guest”) the intimate friend with whom HIS guest-friend practises mutual hospitality, the two coming and going to each other’s houses without prior warning. We live in God through living in Jesus’ word, and God lives in us as we, so to speak, return His hospitality. It is a relationship of complete friendship, complete ease.
And, says Jesus, it comes about through the action of the Holy Spirit. Once again, as with Jesus Himself, the world is ignorant of the Holy Spirit, but the Spirit “is with you, is in you”. The indwelling Holy Spirit brings about the indwelling of the Father and the Son.
As always, we are brought to what I may call “the Pink question”, the question posed by the singer Pink in her 2018 recording “What about us?” How do we fit into all of this?
We must make Jesus’ word our home. We must reflect on His word, allowing it to soak into us, so that it becomes part of us. We must, somehow, give God time and space to enter into us; to create opportunities to be still and silent in His presence, inviting Him in, welcoming Him into His home within us.
Also, we should consider a third meaning of that Greek word xenos . As well as “host” and “guest” it also means “stranger” as in the English word “xenophobia”. The stranger may Himself be Christ, not to be feared but to be welcomed, in the person of the one whom we do not know—yet—but whom we can, and should, serve.
