Day: April 28, 2024

“Now I go my way to him that sent me”

The Passion and the Resurrection reveal the radical meaning of the life of God for us and with us. The purpose of the last three Sundays after Easter is to make visible the very nature of God as eternal life and love in the mutual relationship of God as Trinity. That is, we might say, the burden of these readings from the sixteenth chapter of John’s Gospel, read for centuries upon centuries on these Sundays. The task is to stay close to the images in order to begin to grasp the understanding which they convey to us.

Here Jesus tells us that “now I go my way to him that sent me.” It is a telling remark but, as he immediately says to the disciples, “none of you asks me, Where are you going?” The idea of the Scriptures and their proclamation in the liturgy is that our encounter with the words of Christ should awaken in us questions of inquiry. We are meant to be intellectually alert to what it means. We saw that last week as well when the disciples were perplexed and puzzled about what Jesus was saying. Here in this passage which actually precedes last week’s reading from John 16, Jesus is at pains to teach us about the radical meaning of his Passion and Resurrection. It opens out to us the radical life of God.

The Epistle reading from The Letter of James complements this teaching. It refers us to “the Father of lights,” “from whom every good gift and every perfect gift” comes to us. It mentions as well what was once a commonplace idea, perhaps now largely forgotten, of God as unchangeable and constant, an eternal presence. What derives from the eternal blessedness of God is by definition something good and perfect. To glimpse something of that is to be brought to birth – again the birthing imagery such as we saw last week – “brought to birth by the word of truth.” This helps us to understand how we come to life and live in the motions of God’s own life.

Once again, too, we find that, like the disciples, we are in sorrow at the words of Christ about his going from us. Here he explains what it means. In the context of the whole chapter in its sequence, the point is that we don’t always immediately get it. We hear but don’t fully understand; in part, because we are not asking or seeking for its meaning. This speaks, I think, to an important aspect of our humanity. We are intellectual and spiritual beings who are created for knowledge and love. Ultimately those essential aspects of our humanity find their truth and meaning in what Christ makes known to us; namely, the will of him that sent him.

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