Scripture Reflection for the Sixth Sunday of Easter:
Acts 8:5-8, 14-17
Psalm 66:1-3, 4-5, 6-7, 16, 20
1 Peter 3:15-18
John 14:15-21
As we near the end of the Easter season, we find ourselves hearing this week about someone who isn’t even there.
That would be, of course, the Holy Spirit.
He’s just offstage, lurking in the shadows – predicted, mentioned, alluded to, talked about. He’ll be here soon enough. John the Baptist once told people to prepare for the Messiah; the Church right now is telling us to prepare for the Spirit.
What is coming is something momentous, with roaring wind and tongues of fire and the fearless proclamation of the faith in the streets of Jerusalem. The Church is about to be born. The third person of the Trinity is about to make his entrance; a new chapter will begin.
In the first reading, from Acts, we hear of prayers offered for the people of Samaria “that they might receive the Holy Spirit, for it had not yet fallen upon any of them.”
In the letter from Peter, the author concludes about Jesus: “Put to death in the flesh, he was brought to life in the Spirit.”
And in the Gospel, we have a flashback, continuing a segment of John that we’ve been hearing over the last couple of weeks, with Jesus speaking to his apostles in The Last Supper Discourse. Here, he is heard promising them that “I will not leave you orphans,” reassuring his followers that he will send “another Advocate” – and that Advocate, of course, was (and is) the Holy Spirit.
But there’s more going on here. As the world awaits the arrival of the Holy Spirit, the Church this week has one more message to convey. It cuts to the very heart of John’s Gospel – something profound, fundamental and challenging.
As Jesus gets ready to finish his earthly mission, he has this important closing thought. That is, quite simply, love.
Everything – all that he has said, taught, lived, sacrificed – it all comes down to love. If anyone was wondering, this is what it’s all been about.
This Sunday, you can’t miss it. Love is mentioned in one way or another no less than five times in this brief passage.
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments,” Jesus said. “Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me. And whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him.”
If anyone had any doubts about what Jesus was trying to say, just listen to his last message before his death. It’s all there. And it’s fitting that we’re hearing it now, as Easter draws to a close; it becomes a kind of capstone to what we have been hearing since Holy Week.
Think of the readings we’ve encountered since Easter Sunday from the first Resurrection appearances of Jesus to his journey on the road to Emmaus and his teachings about the shepherd and his sheep. We’ve heard accounts from the Acts of the Apostles of the first Christians beginning to pray together and preach. We’ve seen how the seeds of the Christian faith were planted, watered, nurtured, cared for.
But this week, we are reminded that all of that is connected by this unbreakable bond: Love. Love between Jesus and his Father, love for the Lord, love for Christ’s teachings, love for his commandments and love for one another among the community of believers.
And the question we need to carry in our hearts is: How do we show that love? How do we live it? How do we witness Christ’s love in a broken, divided, often lonely and unhappy world?
How do we continue what the apostles began?
With Easter fading into the background, and our lives returning to “ordinary time,” we are reminded once more this week that the way we live our faith needs to be anything but ordinary.
Deacon Greg Kandra is an award-winning author and journalist, and creator of the blog “The Deacon’s Bench.”
