Pentecost

Gospel Reading: John 14:15-16; 23-26

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 for ever

23 If anyone loves me he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we shall come to him and make our home with him.

24 Those who do not love me do not keep my words. And my word is not my own; it is the word of the one who sent me

25 I have said these things to you while still with you:

26 but the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you every­thing and remind you of all I have said to you.'

Gospel Meditation

Jesus is about to leave his apostles and as he gets ready to do this, he begins to speak to them about something that will hap­pen and will be of tremendous importance for them and for un­derstanding him and where he is coming from.

He tells them of the future coming of the Holy Spirit. He speaks of two things:
- of how close he will be to their own insights
- of what he will teach them, how he will add to what they
have already learnt from him.

He makes two radical points which he stresses right through his teaching. Today, after our long distance from the time of Jesus we look at them with a better understanding of all this implies for us today.

a) The first point is that the Spirit will be true to the teaching of Jesus, those he gave to the apostles and which they must re tain for ever.  These are  tremendously important teaching which we must understand today whatever happens. What happens to us does not matter because Jesus was aware of them even from where he stood at the time of his leaving his followers.

b) The second is that the Spirit will often bring out new things - or, rather, things which seem very new to us. Ii there will be great changes from what the church thought it learnt directly from Jesus. They will therefore be 'new'.

We can now see more clearly than ever before two important things:
- where the disciples were, what was their ideology, how they looked on their world;
- where Jesus wanted to bring them to and the world in which he wanted them to live.

Let us look at these two aspects of the work of the Spirit as they are revealed in this text.

In verses 15 to 16 Jesus says clearly that the Spirit will be ‘old ‘The Father knows the Spirit. They will know that whatever teaches is from the Spirit since the Father has always been ‘with him’ and he is also 'in him’. It is essential then that those who follow the Spirit always make the link between what Jesus d and what they now believe.

On the other hand, he will come with something that seems new. He will conquer whatever weaknesses people will be able to discover in Jesus’ revelations. He will say things which 'the world cannot receive’ since it does not know him nor his full revelation.

In verses 23 to 24, the teaching of the Spirit is ‘old’ in the sense that we shall always come back to Jesus. We will always learn new things from him, from what he revealed to them, Whatever he inspires in us, we will eventually learn to love the Father in him, and Jesus too will make his home with him.

It is 'new’ in the sense that what he will say will be what he learnt from the other two. We who love him will find in his words 'the word of the one who sent him’. He will be revealing what he has learnt from the other members of the Trinity.

In verses 25 to 26, his teaching is 'old’ in the sense that his word is not his own but the word of the one who sent him. This Jesus who 'has said all these things to him from the beginning’. His words are all lasting therefore and will remain valid whatever happens in the future.

His teaching will also be 'new’ 'The Advocate, the Holy whom the Father will send in my name’ ,he will 'teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you’. The Spirit will therefore remind the disciples of all Jesus said to them as he faced his passion.

Prayer

‘ If you wish to attain your being in which God created you, in all noble­ness, you must not reform any difficulty, with all the hardiness and prize you must neglect nothing but valiantly seize the best part. I mean the totality of God as your wealth.'  
Blessed Hadewight of the Holy Beguines

Lord, we pray for the grace to remember the teachings of Jesus. Help us to recognise his presence among us and to look forward to them. We thank you for sending your Holy Spirit into our church of today.

We thank you that the work of the Spirit is new and we must learn many things from what we now see happening in our present world. It is also old, however, and it must always return us to the original teaching of Jesus and of the Father who spoke through him.

We realise today how many wonderful things we can learn from the newly established importance of women in the world today, from all they have done. We must now re-learn and rediscover the many things he taught us and which became lost in the all-male world in which they grew and developed.

We remember today the great things
- within our church,
- in the world as we relate with it apart from the church,
- in the secular world which makes no reference to the church in its findings and discoveries.

We think today of the many things we learn from those who belong to other Christian religions, which we had tended to look down on. We remember with great sadness
- the distance maintained by the Roman Pontiffs and other leaders of our church in the face of the founding of the World Council of Churches and other ecumenical work in the world; we remember similar attitudes, maintained by the leaders of other churches, when they found that their own insights were no longer accepted by our church and so considered themselves far from us.

We think today of the many things we have learnt from those who follow other religions which we once considered far from ours. '

We think of those who follow other religions tied to the people of the East,
the followers of Confucius, Buddha, the Bhagavad Gita and other Eastern sages.

Help us, Lord, in our time to welcome them among us and to learn from them.

We remember the great sages of the Muslim faith.
We thank you for what they can now teach us
In our faith and understanding.

We think of those who belong to the great religions of Africa, and also of North and South America.

We thank you for the wonderful lessons we have learnt from them
- their sense of the greatness of God, present in every creature,
- their sense of the protection of every person on earth,
- their connection with all who have died.

We remember the very great people who have been torn away from our fold
for what they have seen wrong.

They now seem to have no religion at all.

We thank you for all that we have learnt from them.