The words of the Lord in today’s Gospel
may be said to sketch an ongoing dialogue of abiding love, trust, and unity between
the Risen One and us believers. Jesus knows that the disciple is the one who
wants to love the Lord and who actively seeks to love him, though not always
fully succeeding. And Jesus knows as well that our seeking to love God is already
a strong response to the God who first loved us. One who loves the Lord really does
nothing but enter into dialogue with the Lord, responding to the one who spoke to
him first. The fact of having been addressed first by the one we love ought to
give us great courage, confidence and joy to persevere in this dialogue of
prayer throughout our lives.
And the first thing Jesus says to us is:
If you love me, you will keep my
commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate
to be with you always, the Spirit of truth. Please note the order of events
here: first, the Lord speaks; then, we accept his word; and, finally, we act on
it. We must respond to the word of the Lord who, in essence, asks for only one
thing of us: Love one another as I have
loved you! We must love not in any old way, but as I have loved you, which means unconditionally and to the end. Then,
if we keep Jesus’ commandments and love one another, he will enter into a dialogue
with the Father and ask him to bestow his Spirit on us, his disciples. In this
prayer, Jesus asks the Father to grant us the gift that enables the dialogue of
prayer between believers and their Lord to continue throughout history, until
the end of time.
The communication of believers among
themselves and with others must be sustained by the believers’ ability and
willingness to pray, that is, to dialogue with their Lord. And this ability and
willingness themselves are a gift that come to us with the Spirit. As Jesus
assures us, You know him because he
abides in you, and I will be in you. It is by the power and inspiration of
the Spirit and Jesus abiding in us that we can both love and pray.
However, this dialogue is more than
simply ‘dialogue’; it is an actual transmission
of love. The Spirit abides in the disciple and witnesses by this intimate closeness
to the love between the Father and the Son. It follows that the Spirit cannot
be received by those who close themselves off to love. We cannot have the
Spirit in us without this dynamic Presence exploding from within us into love! The
disciples’ love is then reciprocated by the Lord’s promise, I will not leave you orphans but will come
to you. This dialogue gradually becomes the inward presence of the Lord to his
disciples and of the disciples to their Lord. On that day you will know that I am in you and you are in me, says
Jesus. This verse reflects the formula of the ancient covenant between God and
Israel, the affirmation of mutual belonging between the Lord and his people.
And yet it is also crucially different
from that ancient formula. In John the accent falls on intense intimacy and
interiority: instead of the Lord saying ‘I will
be with you’—the usual Old Testament
formula—now Jesus says quite astoundingly, ‘I am in you and you are in
me’, in the present tense of accomplished fact and not the future tense of
promise, and with the unitary preposition in
in place of the binary preposition with;
and the whole affirmation is cast in
a double formula of equal reciprocity.
What Jesus proclaims as existing between himself and his disciple is nothing
less than the inward, mutual, simultaneous, bosom
presence of Lover and Beloved proper to true love. And, since love responds
to love by doing the will of the beloved, at the end of this passage in John
the theme of keeping the commandments
returns, but now expressed in a way that inverts the opening verse: Whoever keeps my commandments and observes
them is the one who loves me. The first time a condition was declared; this time an already existing fact is affirmed. The disciples’ love among
themselves powerfully echoes the love between the Father and the Risen One, in
a dialogue that can have no end because this dialogue upholds the life of
believers in their relationship with their Lord.
The Spirit Jesus promises will abide
permanently in the disciples, becoming the indispensable principle of inner
life that internalizes Christ’s presence in the disciples. By the action of the
Holy Spirit, Christ becomes more interior to us than we are to ourselves. The
Pentecost sequence Veni, sancte Spiritus sings
of the Spirit as dulcis hospes animæ, ‘you,
the soul’s sweet Guest’. The gentleness and tenderness proper to Christ are
also qualities of the Spirit, whom the Church’s tradition has often evoked with
maternal imagery. The Spirit transforms believers into a source of life for
others; indeed, it makes them a space of life for others by making them capable
of generating life.
To love means to give life. The
Spirit, promise, and gift of the Risen One, is characterized, among other
things, by motherly tenderness. And, if the Spirit teaches us how to pray, it
does so in a motherly fashion. As Diadochus of Photice says, ‘the Holy Spirit
teaches us to cry “Abba!” by acting like a mother who teaches her child to call
out “Daddy!” and she repeats that name together with her child until she
instills in him or her the habit of crying out “Daddy!” to God even in sleep’.
The main fruit of the Spirit in the
believer, then, is a truly divine interior life starting right now, because love
cannot subsist without roots that reach deep within us. And the action of God’s
Spirit is the conjointly maternal and paternal action that makes us disciples
into genuine children of God in and with the one eternal Son. This is so true
that, when Jesus promises, I will manifest
myself to them, this can equally be taken to mean, I will manifest myself in them.
This is to say that the believers’ love can manifest the Lord’s love to the
world, by virtue of Jesus’ real presence in us, generated there by the Holy
Spirit. The believer thus becomes the Spirit-created witness of God’s love.
By means of our life, poor as it may
be in itself, we disciples nevertheless narrate
the Lord to others: we can make the
Lord visible to others through our meager persons, manifest him in our humble and yet also great and priceless human
existence, so unfinished and often pitiable and yet always so unique and
marvelous.
This is the fruit of the Holy Spirit,
who, at this very altar, will shortly transform our humble earthly gifts of
bread and wine into the glorious Body and Blood of the risen Lord Jesus, for
our and the world’s eternal nourishment.
Photograph by Brother Brian. Homily by Father Simeon.
