Sixth Sunday of Easter, cycle A

John 14:15-21

I was looking at my wife the other day and I thought, she is beautiful! Now granted 51 years has done a number on both of us. It's very possible other people don't think she is beautiful. But I do. When we first started dating, I thought she was beautiful then. That's how God gets a man and a woman together – we see something beatiful in the other person. But after living with her, raising children with her, going through hard times and easy times, the beauty I see now is way more than the physical beauty that drew me to her in the first place. And I suspect most of the guys who have been married to the love of their life for any length of time would agree.

The reason that she is more beautiful to me now than she was when we first met is because I've learned much more about her, and I've come to know the genuinely good, holy, loving person she is. But that knowledge didn't come easily, didn't happen overnight. It required a great deal of effort, it required an act of the will, not just feelings. I know I can say these things to you because right now she is up in Holyoke doing her music ministry at Our Lady of Guadalupe church. If she were here she would probably have thrown something at me by now.

Jesus is telling us something profound today. He tells us that we will see the Spirit of Truth, the spirit that he leaves as our advocate, but the world will not see him. And we will see him because he is in us. Jesus goes on to tell us that the world will no longer see him, but we will see him, because He lives and we will live. Jesus is actually using the Greek word for seeing; we can't really translate this as “sense his presence” or something like that.

But have you seen the Holy Spirit? Have you seen Jesus? Is this just another one of those mind-blowing sayings of Jesus that seems impossible to make sense of ? All this talk about him being in us and us being in him and him being in the Father. But that's probably the key here. If we want to see the Spirit of Truth who is our advocate, if we want to see Jesus who lives, maybe we are looking in the wrong place. Because Jesus is talking to his disciples, to the Church. And that is you and I. If we want to see the Spirit of Truth, the one that the world does not see, we need to look at each other. And the same is true of we want to see Jesus – we can see him in each other. The Advocate whispers to us, prays in our place, prompts us to obey Jesus' commandments. Jesus lives in us, and tells us very simply that if we love him and keep his commandments, he will love us and so will the Father. And his commandment is to Love one another as He loved us and gave himself up for us.

So this may be one of the most important passages in the New Testament. It tells us that there is a relationship between seeing Jesus and loving him; and that relationship is mediated by how we love each other. And if I get up in the morning with the intention of seeing Jesus in you, with the intention of keeping his commandments when I encounter you, I will be developing a track record; I will be intentionally loving Jesus in you, and with time, I won't need to look elsewhere to see His face. I'll see it when I look at you.

If I take Jesus at his word, then you, my fellow Christians, you are where Jesus lives, where the Holy Spirit lives, where indeed even the Father can be found, since Jesus is in Him and He is in Jesus. When I look at you I see God Himself whether I know it or not. God has been at work in you since your baptism; Jesus has fed you with every Holy Communion; the Holy Spirit has been speaking to you, helping you make decisions, prompting you to keep the commandments of Jesus, and even praying in you as Saint Paul says, prayers that you don't even know you should be praying.

We do not have a God who is far off and totally other. Our God lives in us.

And think of the implications. And they aren't new, they aren't original; Jesus told us this so long ago when he said, “What you do for the least of my brethren you do for me.” He meant this literally.

I think Mother Theresa and so many other saints knew this. That may be the reason that so many of our saints gave up their lives in serving people. If you truly see Jesus in the other person, if you know that God inhabits that person, if you are convinced that God loves that person with an overwhelming, divine love, then the holiest thing you can do is to serve that person. And if you truly see Jesus in the other person, then you are willing to listen to that person, to learn from him or her; because the Holy Spirit is there.

So you see, learning to see Jesus, learning to see the Spirit of Truth, is like learning to appreciate the real beauty of another person, in my case, my wife; it takes work, it takes study, it takes dedication. But we can begin that here and now. As we look at each other, we need to remind ourselves that to the extent this person keeps the commandments of Jesus, Jesus loves that person, and lives in that person. And this is not a mere figure of speech, if we are to believe Jesus. We Catholics believe that Jesus is present, body and blood, soul and divinity in the Holy Eucharist. We know this intellectually, and some of us have come to know it through our experience. Dare we say that you and I are also eucharists, we are also where Jesus dwells, along with the Father and the Spirit. If we remind ourselves of this every day, and live this truth in how we deal with each other, what we know intellectually will become our own experience, and as Jesus promised, we will see Him and the Holy Spirit when we look upon each other.