by CCW | 28 April 2024 10:00
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.
We are being told the things that the disciples were told but only came to understand later. We are seeing the very process of the birth of faith and of the Church in her life and purpose. These passages reveal to us the meaning of the comings and goings of Christ and the Holy Ghost in relation to the Father. What Jesus shows is that all the comings and goings of our lives are found in the comings and goings of God. That should awaken us to the radical meaning of God’s eternal life as something in which we are privileged to participate and enjoy. It means being “brought to birth by the word of truth;” such is “the implanted word,” as James suggests, “which is able to save your souls.” The word of truth planted in us; a lovely image. In other words, the real truth and meaning of our lives is found in what is revealed in the words of Christ.
“It is expedient” or good for you, Jesus says, “that I go away.” The Passion and Resurrection of Christ make known the meaning of the Incarnation and the Trinity. God is not collapsed into our world; he is not taken captive to our desires and purposes. Rather, to use another famous scriptural image, “he led captivity captive” (Eph. 4.8); for “his death hath destroyed death” as the Eastertide Proper Preface so marvellously puts it. We are being raised up into the radical meaning of the Resurrection and shown the life that shall not end. The life of God revealed in Christ’s Passion and Resurrection is the life of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost in the dynamic nature of their co-eternal and consubstantial reality and mutual love and interchange.
Jesus speaks specifically in this reading of the Holy Ghost in two ways: first as “the Comforter” or Paraclete, and secondly, as “the Spirit of truth.” He is, as Jesus says in the Whitsunday or Pentecost Gospel “another Comforter,” along with himself, alluding to the unity of the Godhead. In Jesus’ going from us into his Passion and Resurrection (and, ultimately, his Ascension), we are being shown the true dynamic of our lives as lived for God.
The promise of the coming of the Holy Ghost as Comforter makes known the truth of Christ’s redemption. The world is reproved of three things: sin, righteousness, and judgement. This is unpacked for us. The presence of God with us convicts us of sin; in other words, the idea of God’s beauty, truth and goodness is the condition of our confession and contrition. We are made aware of the gap between ourselves in our sins and follies and the truth of God in whose image we are made but have defaced. But with the coming of the Comforter we are recalled to who we are in Christ.
The world is reproved “of righteousness, because I go to my Father,” Jesus then says. Here we have the great Eastertide phrase, “because I go to the Father.” As Jesus said to Mary Magdalene in John’s great Easter Gospel readings from Chapter 20, “I ascend to my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God,” setting her in motion from sorrow to joy and to the disciples as Apostle Apostolorum, the apostle to the Apostles. His words are a reprise of the marvellous words of Ruth to Naomi in The Book of Ruth read in Christmastide. Such is the universality of the Gospel. It is for all peoples.
The world is reproved “of righteousness” means that the justice of creation is found not in the world itself but by virtue of its being in God; in short, as God’s world and creation. In a very important sense, this rejects the divinity of nature. It is not divine. God is the Creator. Christ’s Passion and Resurrection are testament to that truth and its power. Redemption is the restoration and perfection of Creation.
Finally the world is reproved “of judgement, because the prince of this world is judged.” This signals the overcoming of all that opposes the truth of God captured in the figure of Satan or the Devil. The judgement shows the contradiction of all evil; it denies what it radically depends upon, God. To deny our creatureliness is to deny ourselves and the gift of life and light which we have been given. Here sin is judgement; in other words, we see sin for what it is. That we do so is itself the blessing and belongs to our being guided, as Jesus says, by “the Spirit of truth into all truth.”
This, too, is part and parcel of the challenges for the Church in all times. There is no truth apart from God in Christ; the struggle is to see how every truth that is truth belongs to God and is grounded in God. This reminds us that we see or know but in a glass darkly; that, at best, our knowledge of the world and ourselves is limited and partial, incomplete. Yet we also realise that all that is known and is true belongs to God’s truth.
This Gospel reading is a strong testament to the necessity of the desire to know, the eros or passionate quest for truth; the counter to our culture of despair, and even more of the deeper kind of narcissism noted by Christopher Lasch, “the longing to be free of any longing;” such is the death of ourselves in our despair of knowing and loving, of any longing for the good. Yet the Gospel demands something of us, each according to our capacities, namely, to pursue the understanding revealed to us in and through the images of Scripture. They are the words of Christ given to bring us to birth in him. In every way, through the by-ways and highways, the twisted corners and dead-ends of our lives, we discover that the pilgrimage of our souls is our being gathered into the pilgrimage of the life of God. Such is the burden and purpose of these powerful readings in Eastertide from Chapter Sixteen of John’s Gospel.
To ask where Jesus is going means to learn where and what we seek; “that where I am there ye may be also” (Jn. 14.3).
Fr. David Curry
Easter 4, 2024
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