5th. Sunday of Eastertide (B)
(Acts 9:26-31; 1st. John 3:18-24; John
15:1-8)
Our
Gospel reading today puzzled me somewhat, because it begins with the
words:
Jesus said to His disciples:
“I am the true vine …”
and
then it ends:
By this is My Father glorified, that you bear much fruit
and become My disciples.
I am
aware, of course, that one might interpret those last words in the sense of:
‘bear much fruit and thus become My disciples’ or ‘show yourselves to be’ My
‘true’ disciples, but that is not what John actually says. What then is he saying?
Part
of the second reading from St. John’s first letter, gives us a clue, for there
we read:
Those who keep His commandments remain in Him, and He in
them; and the way we know that He remains in us is from the Spirit He gave
us.
Now,
according to John, Jesus only spoke about asking the Father to send His
disciples another Advocate -- the Holy Spirit -- in the course of this present
discourse; and then He only spoke of the Spirit being sent in the future
(14:15-17; 14:26; 15:26):
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, Whom the world
cannot accept, because it neither sees nor knows Him. But you know Him, because
He remains with you (all, as a body now),
and will be in you (individually).
The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, Whom the Father will send
in My name, will teach you everything.
When the Advocate comes Whom I will send you from the
Father, the Spirit of truth Who proceeds from the Father, He will testify to
Me.
So, for St. John’s presentation of Jesus, there is an
essential difference between His faithful followers during His Palestine days,
and those same followers later endowed with the Risen Lord’s Gift of the Holy
Spirit sent from the Father: the first are called ‘disciples’ by John who
writes, ‘Jesus said to His disciples’; whereas the others are designated as such
in accordance with Jesus’ own most positive and emphatic words,
‘bear much fruit and
become My disciples’.
John’s letter quoted in our second reading backs up
these thoughts, as can be seen, perhaps more clearly, in another translation:
All who obey His commandments abide in Him and He abides
in them. And by this we know that He
abides in us, by the Spirit that He has given us. (NRSV)
We
‘become His disciples’ – that is, those who know the abiding-in-them-Jesus, those
who know Him thus by the personal
communion they have with Him -- by the Gift of the Spirit sent in the name of
Jesus by the Father. For it is the
Spirit Who establishes a personal relationship of loving solicitude and devout
obedience between Jesus and His follower, whereby all
who obey His commandments abide in Him and He abides in
them; and, by virtue of that
relationship, they also come to know
that He abides in them, by the Spirit (He) Jesus has given
them.
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
that it is His
will.
St.
Luke presents the same teaching prominently in our first
reading:
The Church was being built up and walked in the fear of
the Lord; and with the consolation of the Holy Spirit it grew in
numbers.
There we have the difference between those who love
Jesus and think that Christians have all they need for their understanding and
imitation of Jesus in the Bible, perhaps more simply in the New Testament, or
even, indeed, in the Gospels alone, and those – 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 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, who are already members of Christ through
faith and obedience, way beyond and immeasurably far above the awareness of our
own thoughts and the strictness of our personal discipline… no matter how
developed and specialised we (in our pride and folly) may think them to be …
into a Spiritual conformity with Jesus.
For God desires that the full majesty and beauty of the Son-made-flesh be
manifested in the most sensitive detail and to the closest conformity by a
multitude of complementary family
likenesses formed by the Holy Spirit for the glory of the Father of all goodness
and truth.
People of God, God is holy, we 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; 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 in Spirit and in Truth who, as Jesus Himself
revealed and John alone reports, the Father desires above all:
The hour is
coming, and is now here, when true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit
and truth; and indeed the Father seeks such people to worship Him. God is
Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in Spirit and Truth. (4:23s.)
Thus
with the Holy Spirit of love having formed us in Mother Church, the Body of the
Christ Who is the Truth, we will find ourselves most lovingly adopted, and
‘fully at home’, members of the family of God the Father.
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