Sixth Sunday of Easter Year A

Gospel Reading: John 14: 15-21

15 Jesus said to his disciples, "If you love me you will keep my commandments.

16 I shall ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you forever.

17 This is the Spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.

18 I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you.

19 In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.

20 On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.

21 They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them."

Meditation

Like last Sunday's passage, this reading will seem abstract to you at first, but situate it in the context of the Last Supper and you will recognize the movement of Jesus' thought from your own experience and from the lives of great people you have known or read about. As always, it may be helpful to divide the passage and meditate on one section at a time.

Verses 15 to 17: Jesus makes a difference between the way he has been present to the disciples until then and the way he will be present to them after he leaves them. Read it from the point of view of a teacher or a parent who must leave children, or from your memories of any teaching that was outside yourself and then became part of you.

Verses 18 and 19: The same movement expressed in a new metaphor - being orphaned and then realizing that we are not lost after all.

Verse 20: This is a precious verse. It describes the moment when we read the story of Jesus in the gospels and discover that it is not the story of someone outside ourselves, but our own story, and that therefore our stories are really sacred. Great teachers can promise their followers that one day they will experience something similar.

Prayer 

Lord, we thank you that you have called us to be leaders in our community.

At present things are going well: there is trust among us, we share many things, and we are working together.

But we know that this will not last forever, and so we pray that the values we have grown to believe in may become part of us, so that even though the majority of people around us do not accept them, we may continue to live by them, and even though outwardly we will no longer be a community, we may remain one because of that inner bond that unites us.

Lord, from time to time you send us a wonderful person who guides and inspires us; when they die or leave us we feel orphaned.

But then we discover that they are still with us.

Others - even our friends - cannot understand this, but we know that this person is alive, and we know that our lives are fuller because of this.

Lord, forgive us that we always want to see things: we have become so dependent on external stimuli we must be listening to the radio or watching the television; we need to hear sermons or read spiritual books.

Teach us to quieten ourselves so that we may listen to our inner rhythms: the memories we have, both painful and happy; the deep longings of our hearts; the instincts of our nature.

Remind us that Jesus prayed for us that you would make your presence known to us within the truth of ourselves.

Lord, we thank you for those wonderful moments of grace when we knew that our lives were sacred.

We had read the story of Jesus, but it was the story of someone else - the story of the saints, of extraordinary people.

Now we experienced that we too are living Jesus lives, and we are your presence in the world.

Lord, we thank you for people we have known who are not Christians but who love the teachings of Jesus and keep them.