Views From The Pews – Easter VI – Sunday, May 25, 2025
Brothers and Sisters:
This Gospel passage for today radiates a calm, a peace and a reassurance that we all need. But differences and conflicts are bound to arise when Christians are faced with new problems and new questions. God speaks to us through the changing situations in our world. At first sight the answers are not always clear. There are different interpretations and disagreements until we find where the Spirit is leading us. Yet both calm and conflict each remind us of the different ways in which God speaks to us. Through the Spirit, which Jesus promises to send after he has left his disciples, he will continue to be present with his community, the Church.
Jesus says: ‘if anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we shall come to him and make our home with him.’ The proof of our ‘love’ for Jesus is that we keep his ‘word’ and in turn, we will experience the ‘love’ of the Father, and the Father and Jesus will ‘make their home’ in us, guiding us through life, and pointing us in the right direction. For Jesus love is not a feeling but an action. For Jesus, love, or loving, is achieved by ‘keeping his word’.
The ‘word’ of Jesus embraces everything we know about him through the Scripture – his words, his actions, his relationships with people, the guiding principles of his life. Jesus is the ‘Word’ of God not only because of what he says, but because of the whole impact of his life from his birth in a poor shelter in Bethlehem to the last moments of agony and humiliation on the Cross.
The ‘Word’ of Jesus also comes to us from all our interactions within the Christian community. It comes to us through the whole of creation of which Jesus is the Head and with which he identifies with his Creator Father. The Church, sometimes fractious and flawed, is called to work for the transformation of our world of sin and weakness. Through this community, with all its faults, the Spirit continues to speak as it did in the days of the first disciples. It was precisely because those disciples listened to the situation of the new non-Jewish converts, as described in today’s reading from Acts, that the Church realised where the Spirit was leading it.
A Church that is an enclosed and elitist society is no longer the Church that Jesus founded. When we become aware of the ways in which the Lord comes into our lives then we can experience a desire to share in the loving that reaches out from God and then start reaching out ourselves to others.
Contributed!