Jesus today reveals our place in the divine life - bound to Him in the same breath of love by which he is bound to the Father: He challenges us to love Him by keeping His commandments. It is a powerful revelation both of our ultimate purpose and of what it really means to love. "If ye love me, keep my commandments" - a simple yet elegant reminder that real love demands fidelity, id demands loving words and actions, not just emotions. The Spirit comes to dwell in us only when we have chosen to love Christ and (in loving him) to obey him. Homily for VI Sunday of Easter Year A (John 14:15-21)
One of the wonderful things about studying for the priesthood in Rome, aside from Rome itself, is that, rather than doing all our studies in-house like they did at the English Seminaries, we went out to the Pontifical Universities and studied with students from all around the world. At my first University, because it was an English-speaking university, there was a large contingent of English-speaking lay students from the USA, Britain, Germany, and the Nordic countries who had all chosen to come to Rome for a proper Catholic education – they weren’t studying to be priests or nuns, but were all faithful Catholics looking to deepen their understanding and knowledge of the faith. What this meant was that, for the English Seminarians in Rome, we had a large social circle outside our college of faithful and committed young Catholics.
One of my lay friends from the university was particularly active in organising things for us all to do together (in every group of friends you find at least one person who has a gift for organising everyone else!) She would organise trips out of the city or picnics by the Tiber for people’s birthdays, and she organised those of us who could sing into a mini-schola to provide music for station Masses and festal Masses all over Rome.
A few years ago she organised a party at her sister’s flat for All Saints Day – like an anti-Halloween where we were all invited to dress as our favourite saints and try to get people to guess who we were. Several friends were very inventive, coming up with convincing costumes as St Agnes (complete with a lamb), St Lawrence with his gridiron, and St Maximillian Kolbe in his prison uniform. I, somewhat less inventively, wore my cassock and decided to be St Edmund Campion.
Before the party started, she had also organised for a Norbertines Priest (from the Order of Canons Regular of Prémontré) to come to the nearby Church, St John at the Latin Gate and celebrate a Mass for us in the Norbertine Rite, and our little schola would sing together for this Mass. Whilst I joined them for the Mass chants, I am (unfortunately) hopelessly unable to read proper music, and so I sat out while they sang the special pieces they had prepared. At the offertory, one of those pieces of music they sang was inspired by today’s Gospel. It was written in 1565 by Thomas Tallis, and it is in my mind perhaps the most beautiful piece of Church music written for the English language; If Ye Love me:
If ye love me, keep my commandments.
And I will pray the Father,
and he shall give you another comforter,
that he may 'bide with you forever;
E'en the sp'rit of truth.
This Sunday’s Gospel is a preparation for us, moving from Easter, from the joy of the resurrection, through the uncertainty of the days after the Ascension, to Pentecost and the sending of the Holy Spirit among the disciples. It offers us a powerful reflection on the inner life of God and how we are adopted into that life.
Jesus is the Son, the Word of God eternally begotten of the Father. The Father loves him, and he loves the Father, and that relationship of love which binds the two of them together is the Holy Spirit. St Thomas Aquinas describes the Spirit’s coming into being as a Spiration, literally a breath. The breath of love from the Father to the Son, and from the Son back to the Father. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Divine love. Immediately before the passage we read today Jesus says to his apostles “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (Jn 14:10). He tells them that to have seen him is to have seen the Father. He is revealing the Holy Trinity to them, so that they can come to understand that God (at the core of his being) exists in a relationship of love, a breath which now overflows from the Father, through Christ, to us - enveloping us into the body and divine life of Christ.
Having explained this, having revealed the Trinity, Jesus then explains what that means for us; he offers that same relationship to each one of us and reveals God’s plan for human beings. “If you love me you will keep my commandments. I shall ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate (comforter) to be (live) with you for ever.” He says of the coming of the Holy Spirit “On that day you will understand that I am in my Father and you in me and I in you.” He is inviting us to have the same relationship with the Father that he himself enjoys; bound in the infinite love that exists between the Father and the Son, by the same infinite power that binds the two of them together, living in the midst of that breath of love. He is saying that each one of us is called to share in the divine life, the relationship of love which is at the core of God’s being.
Not only does he reveal our lofty calling, but he draws us a map; he tells us how to get there. If you love me you will keep my commandments. Very often we make the love of Jesus something emotional. We can feel guilty if we don’t feel something all the time when we pray or when we come to Mass. If we don’t feel completely, ecstatically, in love at every moment of our religious lives. This is the same poisonous thinking that infects so many marriages today; when the early infatuation wears off and all those habits you overlooked in your husband or your wife start to grate on your nerves, or worse when you settle into a routine and everything about married life seems mundane or boring, and you start to think you might not be in love any more. It’s a devil’s trick – both in religion and in a marriage, that tells us love is first and foremost about emotion, something in our heads or in our hearts, because when the emotion goes cold we find ourselves abandoning something we thought we loved.
Jesus explains it to us here, it isn’t about emotion, but about choice. Choosing to love Jesus means choosing to follow his commandments. The Spirit moves us to choose Jesus, like a whisper in our ear or an itch under our skin, and when we surrender to that movement of the Spirit, when we choose to obey Jesus, he comes to dwell within us and transform us little by little into images of Christ through the good works and words he inspires. Some of the greatest saints in the history of the Church have had deep, passionate, emotional love for Christ. Some have been utterly cold. Some, like mother Theresa, went through months, years, or even decades of dryness where they felt nothing at all. And yet what bound them to Christ was their Spirit-moved choice to obey. What they did and what they said, their faithfulness to the calling, that was the true measure of their love.
This is as true in our relationships with each other as it is in our relationship to Christ. Love means fidelity, or faithfulness. Loving your husband or wife isn’t about emotion but about keeping your vows; to honour, respect, and care for one another in whatever circumstances life throws your way. What’s more, the more you honour, respect, and care for one another by what you say and do, the stronger the bond between you will be even if the emotions have gone cold. Don’t think this is only applicable to married couples either; it’s true of every human relationship. It’s all very well to say we love our neighbour, but that love is only real love if it is matched by our actions; do we help people who are in need, do we visit them when they’re lonely, do we speak kind words about them when they are absent, do we pray for them? Or do we do the opposite? Are we indifferent to their needs? Do we speak ill of them or gossip behind their back?
Jesus says “If you love me you will keep my commandments. I shall ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you for ever.” The Spirit who binds the Father to the Son in love is calling us to become temples of that same love. In response we are called to build those temples with the works of mercy and obedience to Jesus; so long as we choose to obey, the Spirit will come and live in us, and help us to build a fitting temple for him to dwell through our words and actions, and on the last day we will see that all this time we have been sharing in the life of God through those good works inspired by the Spirit. In this way, we will go to meet him in eternity as members of His body, living in Him in the divine life; the Breath of love which comes from the Father.
Bonus: the impromptu schola singing at St John at the Latin Gate back in 2021
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