 |
| The dove is an ancient symbol of the Holy Spirit. |
The passages we read last Sunday and read this coming Sunday from the fourteenth chapter of John’s Gospel are words of Jesus after the Last Supper in the Upper Room in Jerusalem on the night before he died.
I think we read them in this Easter season because the night before he died Jesus was speaking about going away and not being seen (“Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe”), and now we are coming the end of the period of time after the first Easter, when the visible appearances of the risen Jesus were coming to an end.
The timeline of that brief period of visible appearances in the Book of Acts is forty days. So, on the church calendar, we keep the fortieth day after Easter as Ascension Day (this coming Thursday, May 2.)
We are told in Acts that the followers of Jesus spent the next nine days in prayer in Jerusalem until the Day of Pentecost, when they received the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Pentecost comes from the Greek for fifty, and was already the Greek-Jewish name for a Jewish festival fifty days after Passover. Now it became the name of the new feast, fifty days after Easter.
So we will keep the fiftieth day of Easter, Pentecost, the third great feast of day of the church year, on Sunday, June 12.
With this timeline in mind, we turn to this Sunday’s Gospel passage.
Jesus said to his disciples, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”This is a repeated theme of Jesus on the night before he died. His new commandment (in Latin novum mandatum, from which we get the name Maundy Thursday) was and is to love one another. If we love him, we show it by loving one another.
“And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate,”
“Advocate” is a fascinating word in the original Greek – Paraclete. You may see references to the Paraclete.
“And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.”
The Holy Spirit – the Advocate – is the Name of God who is present with us, dwelling within us. Paul writes that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. “he abides with you, and he will be in you.”
"I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you.”
I believe Jesus meant not only coming at the End – in what is called the Second Coming – but is truly present in the Holy Spirit.
Jesus died and was buried and on the third day rose. For a brief time he was visibly present with his friends. I believe this was given so they, and we, might know he was truly risen. Then he was no longer visibly present.
Where was he? With the Father. Where is that? In heaven. Where is that? Where God is. Where is that? Beyond us, bigger than us, transcending us – hence the imagery of up, of Ascension.
But also with us.
When the unseen Holy Spirit comes to be with us, to live within us, God is truly present and at God’s heart lives the risen Jesus.
God loves us with the love we see in Jesus. The Holy Spirit
There is a direct continuity between the compassion and love Jesus showed the blind beggar on the road one day, and the love God gives you and me now.
“In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.”
We will live in heaven. And we will live in the new life here on earth.
“On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them."
(Raymond Webster)
____________________________________________________________________
The Bible text of the Gospel lesson is from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Church of Christ in the USA, and used by permission.
