In this morning’s lectionary readings we are experiencing a bit of time travel – here we are, six Sundays into the Easter season, and we’re reading about, in Acts, the Apostles’ travels to Macedonia and Neaoplis and Philippi, which take place after Jesus’s Ascension (which happens next week) – and then hearing the Revelation to John, which describes the Kingdom to come, the end of time, “the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God.”
And then there’s the Gospel, which we just heard – which, on this sixth Sunday of Easter, takes us right back to Holy Week, to Maundy Thursday, the night before Jesus is arrested and crucified – one night before the world falls apart for his friends and disciples, and four days before the women come to the tomb and find it empty, death and empire defeated in this unexpected, universe-changing way, and Jesus come back to his beloveds from beyond the grave.
This is another one of those Sunday mornings when we are reminded of the beauty and the complicated fabric of the liturgical year, when we move through the seasons sometimes so quickly it’s as if we’re sitting in all of them at once, holding together the already and the not yet in this physical world, while we are waiting for the eternal one. In this annual journey of liturgical seasons, we travel and rejoice and lament and wait, discovering the story of our Church’s beginnings – from Advent to Ascension, and all the Gospel events in between – the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Baptism of our Lord, Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday – and Easter.
And then, connecting it all, our lectionary, the cycle of Sunday morning readings that connect our present day with our Genesis roots – the story of our faith, all the way back to the beginning of time, when the Spirit moved over the waters and God made the cosmos and said, “It is good.”
This Sunday-to-Sunday, season-to-season shared journey through our faith and our faith history reminds me a little bit of a kaleidoscope – this colorful, brilliant, fragmented, sometimes mixed-up telling of stories – yet, shine a light through them and they are suddenly beautiful, ordered, illuminated and illuminating. All the fragments together tell a new story, a new window into faith. Turn the lens and the colors and the beauty shift with our perspective, becoming a new way of looking at the whole through its parts.
But back to today’s Gospel, which takes us back, in the middle of the Easter season, to Holy Week, and Jesus’s last supper with his friends. We are hearing what is called Christ’s Final Discourse – a message of love and of comfort and of hope to his disciples before Good Friday.
In this Gospel, three important messages – many important messages, but three I’d like to think about today – that Jesus gives to his disciples – in a sense, three gifts he gives them, in this Final Discourse.
The first. “We will come to them” – we will come to you – “and make our home with [you].” He tells them: the Spirit will be among us, in all of the things.
““Earlier Jesus had spoken to his disciples of the ‘many dwellings’ in his Father’s house, where he was going to prepare a place for them,” as Lutheran pastor Elisabeth Johnson writes[1].
“Now Jesus says that he and the Father will come and make their dwelling with those who love him and keep his word. In John’s Gospel, ‘eternal life’ begins here and now.”
What a turning upside-down, this presence, this gift of presence: God, making God’s home with us. First in the body of a man, a teacher, a fellow traveler, Jesus, and now, in the presence of the Spirit.
And just as Jesus did then, the Holy Spirit dwells with us now, not just on the mountaintops but in the valleys, in all the uncomfortable places, the places where we are afraid, the places we are angry, the places where we are hurt, the places where we are tired. Just as Jesus lived with us in the space of grief and fear and anger and hurt – and in the space of joy and fellowship and reconciliation, and hope – so will the Holy Spirit, an echo of Jesus’s voice in our hearts, guiding us, moving us, sometimes in directions we don’t expect to go.
The second gift that Jesus gives them: Peace. “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.”
And remember, Jesus is talking to his disciples the night before he knows he will be arrested, the night before he knows he will be sentenced to death, after he has shocked them by kneeling and washing the dust of the road off their feet. They don’t know what’s coming, not truly. And on an evening when he could have said more, could have asked them for comfort, he is giving them peace. Hours before he will be arrested in the garden, he is promising them that they will not be alone when the unthinkable happens – and they will be alone in the Easter resurrection to come.
And the third gift that he gives them, the third message – a reminder:“Keep my word.”
Jesus also sends the Holy Spirit to remind us of why we live this life, to help us, when we need it, to hold together, and to help us carry, the heartbreak of our present time and the simultaneous hope of it.
“…the Advocate, the Holy Spirit,” Jesus tells them, “whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.”
Keep my word. That word that dwells among us still, that distills down to the greatest commandment – love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself. Love God. Love your neighbor. That is the constant. And that is the challenge, especially in times when our communities are divided in so many ways. Keep loving this imperfect, beautiful kaleidoscope of a world.
From the words of today’s Psalm:
May God be merciful to us and bless us, *
show us the light of his countenance and come to us.
In these times, in these times, in these griefs, and in these joys, in all our hope, Holy Spirit, come. Amen.
[1] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/sixth-sunday-of-easter-3/commentary-on-john-1423-29-5
