Dear
People of God, it is important for us to realize that today’s Gospel reading is not recorded by the other three
Gospels, only St. John tells us about Jesus’ discourse to His ‘Last Supper’ disciples in which He
said:
I am the true vine and My Father is the vinedresser … you are the branches;
before
going on to say, as you heard:
By this is My Father glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be My disciples.
From
those words, it would seem that there was something not yet sure – fully secure,
that is -- about the ‘discipleship’ of those committed followers of Jesus who
had followed Him all the way from Gallilee to Judea and its hostile capital,
Jerusalem
Our
second reading from St. John’s first letter, gives us some help, for there we
read:
Whoever
keep His commandments abides in God, and God in him. And by this we know that He abides in us, by
the Spirit Whom He has given us.
The missing link between His faithful disciples who accompanied Him throughout His Public Ministry, and those same disciples Jesus urged at the Last Supper to ‘prove (yourselves) to be My disciples’ would seem to be the Risen Lord’s Gift of the Holy Spirit. For they did, indeed, ‘prove themselves to be authentic ‘disciples’ of Jesus and ‘Apostles’ worthy to be sent in His name to the nations, by obeying the Spirit of power given them after His Resurrection and Ascension, to form them in the likeness of their Crucified and Risen Lord and enable them to proclaim His Gospel in His Name, and establish His Church by their inspired teaching and preaching, and the personal witness of their mighty deeds.
Whittled
down in numbers by the snares of the devil and the trials and temptations of
the modern ‘anything-goes’ world, It is easy for surviving, enduring , ‘going-to-Mass-on-Sunday-and-Holy-Day-Catholics’
to think of ourselves as ‘disciples’ of
Jesus. But we cannot allow ourselves to
forget that Jesus required His apparently true ‘Last Supper’ disciples to prove
themselves as fully authentic followers of Himself. And so, each of us today should ask ourselves
the question: ‘Have I proven myself to be -- in some measure -- a true disciple
of Jesus, or am I a wind-bag full of nothing more than ‘the right words’, or merely
a pretender, unable to decide and unwilling to suffer?
Dear
friends in Christ, it is the Spirit Who establishes a personal relationship between Jesus and His true followers, enabling
those who follow His -- the Spirit’s – lead,
to abide in Jesus by obeying His commandments,
and, by virtue of that relationship, to come to know that
He – Jesus their Lord and Saviour -- abides in them.
And at
this important juncture it is most important to realize that the Father commands
us, Jesus commands us, but the Holy Spirit persuades, encourages, urges,
guides, enlightens, strengthens and comforts us as disciples of Jesus. He does not , however, command us, because
His mission is to form us personally in our-own-truest personal spiritual
relationship with Jesus, as an in-Him-child of God, for the Father.
And so,
dear People of God, Jesus demands obedience from all His disciples, but above
all He desires such commitment to be imbued with the intimate beauty of
personal communion, whereby the ‘do-er’ of His will, delights in
the awareness of His presence.
St. Luke
presents the same teaching essentially in our first reading:
The
Church was being built up; and, walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort
of the Holy Spirit, it multiplied.
There we have the difference between those who love Jesus and think that Christians have all they need for their right understanding and imitation of Jesus in the Bible (perhaps more simply in the New Testament, or even, indeed, in the Gospels alone), and those who – like ourselves who in the God-given Church -- seek not simply to know the words Jesus uttered and imitate the things He did, but aspire above all to be formed by the very Spirit of Jesus in the likeness of Jesus. We pray for, and invite, the Holy Spirit to guide us -- already members of Christ through faith and obedience -- way beyond, and immeasurably far above, any awareness of our own loving thoughts or strictness of our personal discipline, into a Spiritual, by-the-Holy-Spirit, conformity with Jesus. For God desires that the full majesty and beauty of the Son-made-flesh be manifested in the most sensitive detail by the full complementary of a whole family of likenesses formed by the Spirit in each and all the individual members of the Children of God – redeemed by Jesus -- for the glory of the Father of all goodness and truth. No human being is infinite, and the truest spiritual likeness of Jesus can only be formed by a multiplicity of beautiful aspects, glimpses, likenesses and aspirations, of Him Who was, is, and ever will be, the only sublime human likeness of His heavenly Father.
People of God, God is holy, we, of ourselves, are not; God is good, we are needy; let us not, therefore, try to prescribe ourselves a ‘Jesus’ for our imitation, based on our own thoughts, no matter how studious or learned they may be, nor on our own aspirations or imaginations, no matter how pious they may be. Rather let us try to just love the Lord proclaimed by Mother Church with all our heart, understand Him in her Scriptures to the utmost of our mind, embrace Him in her Eucharist with heart-felt warmth and sincerity, and then both humbly and prayerfully entrust ourselves to the Holy Spirit, beseeching Him to form us into a likeness of Jesus in Mother Church, as He most wonderfully formed Jesus Himself in the womb of Mary.
For we
are all -- throughout our lives -- meant to be formed as other, mutually
complementary, Christs in the womb of Mother Church, by the Spirit. And
after such a life-time gestation, our ultimate birth into heavenly life should
be characterized first and foremost by a sublimely childlike cry of ‘THANK YOU,
my Father, my God, and my All’! A cry
most befitting those worshippers who, as Jesus Himself revealed and John alone (4:23s.)
reports, the Father desires above all:
The hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such people to worship Him. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.
