Believe it or not, dear friends, in this oddest of years we are already celebrating the Sixth Sunday of Easter. This means that we are preparing for that major feast, which comes second only to Easter: Pentecost. Indeed, the Holy Spirit, sent by Christ after he ascended to the Father’s right hand is a major focus of today’s readings.
The fruit of the Third Glorious Mystery of the Blessed Virgin’s Rosary, which bids us to meditate on the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, is God’s love for us. In today’s Gospel reading, taken from Saint John’s Last Supper Discourse, Jesus assures his worried disciples that he will not abandon them. He tells them, “I will come to you.”1 Of course, the Spirit comes fifty days after Jesus’s resurrection on what became the first Christian Pentecost.
It cannot be emphasized enough that the Holy Spirit is the mode of Christ’s resurrection presence among us, in us, and through us. In other words, the Holy Spirit, as Jesus indicates later in the same chapter from which our Gospel today is taken, “will teach you everything and remind you of all that [I] told you.”2 Just as the Son speaks the will of the Father, the Holy Spirit, in turn, speaks the will of the Father and the Son.
We have to tread lightly whenever we speak of commandment-keeping. We must do so because in talking about keeping the commandments it easily turns into long lists of prescriptions and proscriptions, that is, dos and donts. The Pharisees, to whom Jesus had a thing or two to say, were great at making lists of rules and, at least in their own minds, even better at keeping those rules. When we start to make such lists, we begin to speak and act as if our salvation depends on our own relative goodness, our own righteousness. Thanks be to God, it does not. If it did, there would be absolutely no reason for us to celebrate this morning.
During Saint John’s Last Supper Discourse, Jesus gives his disciples only one commandment: love one another as I have loved you.3 To keep Jesus’s commandments is to do what love requires in every situation. This requires constant prayerful discernment. To love another means to seek her/his good, even at a cost to yourself. Agape requires diakonia. Love requires selfless service. This is how you “Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.”4
It has been noted that no good deed goes unpunished. Our epistle reading today bids us persist in love even when doing that means suffering for doing what is good. Never forget that the most loving and good deed in the universe was when the Lord of the universe “humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.”5
When we speak in our overheated times and in our hothouse American culture about the Holy Spirit, our words and minds turn to almost crazy things: speaking in tongues, writhing on the floor, laughing hysterically, staged healings, shouting, etc. Therefore, it is important to bear in mind what the inspired word of God enumerates as the gifts of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.”6
This is not to dismiss belief in the miraculous, it is just to bring our expectations more in line with Sacred Scripture and Christian experience. Jesus, who seems to me to have been quite ambivalent about the miracles he performed, said that it is “An evil and unfaithful generation seeks a sign.”7
In our first reading, Philip, reckoned by the Church to be one of the first seven deacons, demonstrates the power of the good news. By proclaiming Jesus’s resurrection and his Lordship and Messiahship, the power of the Gospel began to be made manifest as people were cured of various ailments and liberated from oppression by the enemy.
Peter and John went to Samaria to confirm the baptism of those who responded in faith to Philip’s preaching. They conferred on them, by the laying on of hands, the same Spirit by which Philip, who, like Stephen and the other five men set apart, was filled. This brought “great joy” to their city.8
Philip, who fled Jerusalem to avoid persecution, was able to give the people of the city of Samaria “an explanation” for his hope.9 Presumably, as with his encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch, he did so with gentleness and reverence, as one would expect of a person filled with the Holy Spirit.10
During this season of Easter, perhaps more this year than ever, “We are,” in the words of Saint Augustine from a discourse on the Psalms,
all urging one another to praise the Lord, and all thereby doing what each of us urges the other to do. But see that your praise comes from your whole being; in other words, see that you praise God not with your lips and voices alone, but with your minds, your lives and all your actions11We are made from love in order to love. In reality, our lives have no other purpose. Our words and actions, therefore, should flow from loving God by loving one another. When people consider the community of Saint Olaf Parish, they should come away marveling: “See… how they love one another.”12
1 John 14:18.↩
2 John 14:26.↩
3 John 13:34.↩
4 1 Peter 3:15.↩
5 Philippians 2:8.↩
6 Galatians 5:22-23.↩
7 Matthew 16:4.↩
8 Acts 6:3; Acts 8:8.↩
9 1 Peter 3:15.↩
10 See Acts 8:26-40; 1 Peter 3:16.↩
11 Liturgy of the Hours, Volume II, Office of Readings, Saturday, Fifth Week of Easter, Second Reading, 757-758.↩
12 Tertullian, Apology, chap. 39.↩
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