Eleventh Sunday in Ordiinary Time, cycle B

Mark 4:26 --34

When I was growing up I had several uncles who were farmers. Most of the time they planted wheat. In the fall they would plant “winter wheat”, a hardy variety that actually came to maturity in the spring; and then they would plant “summer wheat” a fast-growing variety that could be harvested in the fall. Although they had chickens and pigs and an occasional cow, they really relied on the wheat crops to make most of their income. This was “dry land” farming. Some areas, close to rivers and streams, could be irrigated with diverted water, but my uncles pretty much depended on rain. And that meant that there were years where the summer crop did not come through – from drought, sometimes, and hail other times. The winter wheat was more reliable, but wasn't enough by itself. So I witnessed the kind of anxiety Jesus was talking about, especially as the season progressed. My uncles would walk the fields, looking at the growth, trying to see promising signs; and when the wheat was almost ready to harvest, they would look to the skies, knowing that rain could delay and hail could ruin the harvest. Being a dryland farmer was very exciting. But a day would come most years when they would get the crop in and clean up the equipment and rest for a while.

Jesus tells us about the kingdom of heaven with two parables. One is the parable of the anxious farmer, and the other, the parable of the mustard seed. And we are invited, I guess, to see ourselves in these little stories.

In the story of the anxious farmer, Is that you and I? Is Jesus telling us to sew good seed and count on God to bring it to fruition? The farmer, after all, knows not how the seed would sprout and grow. Perhaps that is a good lesson. But maybe we are the farmer who recognizes when the crop is ready to harvest, and we devote our energies to harvesting. I like that image a bit better. Because all around us, as Jesus told us in another parable, “the harvest is abundant but the laborers are few”. In our modern times we are too diffident; we have been given the Church, the scriptures, teachers like Pope Francis – and all of us because of what we have been given can recognize when the Holy Spirit is moving among those around us. Jesus told his disciples that they would be fishers of men, that they should go into all the world teaching and baptizing. And all of us have been given the opportunity to be men and women of mission, people who should be anxiously looking for signs that the harvest is ready, and then gently and with love, helping our friends to become closer to the Lord, to deepen their relationship with the Lord. We are not expected to make the kingdom come; that's God's work, that's the soil, that's the part where we don't understand what is happening. But we are supposed to be there at the harvest, we are supposed to be the harvesters.

And the story of the mustard seed. Mark puts these two stories together, and there are similarities. Just as the farmer doesn't know how seeds grow, we don't know how a mustard seed gets to be a big plant with birds nests in it. But Jesus says we can learn something about the kingdom from contemplating a mustard seed. I think the key words here are “Once it is sewn”. The mustard seed is full of potential, it just needs the opportunity, the right circumstances. And maybe that's our lesson as well. The kingdom, after all, is where everyone is given the opportunity to become the best version of themselves that they can, as Matthew Kelly is always preaching. But we all know that becoming the best version of oneself requires three things: first, you have to have an idea of what that looks like. If in my case I thought the best version of myself should be a racing jockey, I'm probably not being realistic. We have to look at what we have been given by God and how we can grow those talents and virtues. Second, we need to have the desire to make ourselves over, with God's help, to be this best version. And third, we need the means. If I am in the business of sewing mustard seeds, and we all are, because we are a community, how are we encouraging each other to be the best versions of themselves? I think especially of our young people, the future of the church. I think of young parents, who have it in their power to become domestic churches, bringing up their children to be faithful Catholic Christians, but who more often than not have very little involvement in the Church – and we all know that children who grow up in these kinds of homes are probably not going to have anything to do with the Church when they become adults. I don't know why, but God, who promises that if the mustard seed is sewn, he will do the rest, has decided to let his people do the sewing, and we aren't doing it very well. So this is a good Sunday to ask those questions. Is the way I live my life showing my neighbors, my family, my friends, what it is like to be faithful? Am I praying for those I love that they will catch fire and find in themselves the desire to become the best version of themselves they can be? And what am I doing materially to help people realize their true potential? Am I working with some ministry that directs its energies along these lines? Am I supporting such efforts with part of my charitable giving? How am I sewing mustard seeds?

That's what Christianity is about, after all.

Tenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle B

Mark 3:20 – 35

What is the sin against the Holy Spirit that cannot be forgiven? In other words, is there a limit to God's mercy? That's what Jesus seems to be saying, after all.

I think the readings for this weekend help us to determine that. In Jesus' time, whether you were a Sadducee or a Pharisee or a tax collector, you had grown up hearing the stories of your people-- the story of the escape from Egypt; the feats of Moses and Joshua and King David; the sayings of the prophets. That was the equivalent of grade school; you learned what made you part of the nation of Israel. Those stories sustained you whether you were in exile, or whether you were living far from your native land, or whether you were living in Palestine under Roman rule. God was on your side, that's what the stories said. Someday God would return to His people. And there were many ways you would be able to tell – one of the first predictions was in the Book of Genesis – you just heard that reading. God curses the serpent, and promises that “her offspring...” will crush his head, and he will strike at his heel. In other words, and this isn't the only place we find the promise – the promised one will have power over demons. And the whole of Palestine has witnessed Jesus driving out demons. In In fact the demons themselves testified that Jesus was the promised one – if you read the part of Mark just before this part, you would see that. So what could be more clear?

But those who knew the law best, the teachers, the Pharisees, could not accept this; they called Jesus evil, they said, “He uses the power of the devil to cast out devils”. Jesus of course showed them what a ridiculous idea this was. But there was another group who did not believe. The Pharisees who knew the law best, did not believe; but Jesus' relatives, who knew Jesus best, did not believe either. They said, “He is mad!” I am excepting Mary of course. I suspect she came along to make sure that the mob made up of Jesus relatives did not cause him harm, because forcibly bringing him home with the intention of locking him up in what passed for the local psychiatric ward could very well end up badly, given the crowds that were following him avidly.

And that is the sin against the Holy Spirit. You see, the Holy Spirit offers to guide each of us. But to be guided requires humility; it requires at the very least, the acknowledgment that you need to be guided. And that's a very hard lesson for us to learn. After all, we spend much of our lives trying to increase our ability to control everything. Two year olds act up because they are trying to assert that they are persons distinct from their mothers. Teenagers rebel against their parents because they are forming their own value systems, which are almost always not quite the value systems of their parents. People who are starting out in their careers set goals for themselves and try to achieve these; and they are almost always things that give them more control over their lives. The Pharisees were not bad people; but if they admitted that Jesus drove out demons by the power of God, their whole world would be turned upside down. And if Jesus' relatives, probably also not bad people, were to admit that Jesus who had abruptly left his job in their home town and was wandering around Galilee causing trouble was sane, they would also have to admit that God had been in their midst all those years – and that would have turned their world upside down.

That's what the Holy Spirit does – He turns your world upside down. And if you have the humility to recognize that you need this to happen in your life, he will. Having your world turned upside down is basically what is meant by repentance. Jesus is saying that if you don't see the need to change yourself, if you don't see that you are a sinner and the only way you can do something about it is to allow the Holy Spirit to change you, then there is nothing anyone can do for you; that's the unforgivable sin.

Pope Francis in his recent exhortation, said that there are two heresies troubling modern Christians. One is gnosticism; that's when I think I can control my life and my eternal destiny by knowing the right stuff. It isn't just knowing of course; it's being certain that I am right and then living accordingly. The other heresy is pelagianism. Here I believe that if my behavior is good enough, my life will go well and my eternal destiny is assured. And the Pharisees and the relatives of Jesus are guilty of both of these.

Jesus tells us how we can be sure we are on the right track, how we can know that we are being lead by the Holy Spirit. We are his brothers and sisters and even closer – his mother – if we hear the word of God and keep it. God's word isn't hard to find. It is expressed in scripture, in Sacrament, in our brother and sister Christians (because he said where two or three are gathered together in his name, He would be there). If we look to God's word for direction in leading our lives, in dealing with other people, in drawing closer to God, and then if we deliberately follow those insights,those leadings, we will be putting ourselves under the direction of the Holy Spirit. If we are not doing those things, can there be any hope for us?

Corpus Christi, 2018

Mark 14:12 – 16, 22 – 26

When I was growing up, I had two grandmothers. One was Scotch-Irish, and the other was very German, the daughter of immigrants. They didn't like each other much. But what they had in common was that whenever I visited one of them, I got fed. My German grandmother was a very good baker, and she would put out cinnamon rolls and pie. My Scotch-Irish grandmother wasn't much of a cook, but she could make custard, so that is what she served me. Now either of them could have just opened a pack of cookies and I would probably have eaten that – I was, after all, a growing boy. But what they served me had to pass through their hands – they had to put a little of themselves into it.

I do a lot of cooking myself, and when I'm feeding someone, I like that feeling myself. I tell my wife that's why I don't take her out to supper more often; it seems so impersonal to just order from a menu. She of course thinks that I'm just cheap. But I think most people recognize that preparing food for someone they love with their own hands is kind of special. We put something of ourselves into what we serve.

Jesus spent his public years teaching and working miracles. He did on a couple of occasions prepare food for people – remember the miracles in which he fed large numbers of people with very small amounts of food? But other than blessing the food he didn't do much preparation; he rather multiplied the food.

And so, after he had taught all he could by word and example, he came to the Last Supper, which we've just heard about. And this time he fed his disciples with himself – he put himself into what he served, more so by far than my grandmothers did. And I think that's a good way to understand the Eucharist.

It is God reaching down to us, feeding us with what he has lovingly prepared, feeding us not a symbol, but the very being of His Son. It is an act of Love on his part, giving us, as he did on the cross, his entire self. It is an embrace of a lover, a kiss given by a parent to a child. It cannot be more intimate, and it tells us that God loves our bodies as much as he loves our souls.

Have you ever thought about what a visitor from outer space would think if he watched our Sunday Liturgy? He would of course conclude that most of us must come here to receive the little white wafer; in fact, some of us don't even begin to pay attention to what is going on until we come forward for communion. And after receiving the wafer, some of us leave before the mass is even finished; Our visitor would definitely conclude that receiving that bit of bread was the whole point of the Liturgy. And he would notice that only a small fraction of us partake of the cup. He would conclude that this isn't nearly as important as the wafer, even though Jesus has told his followers to eat his body, the consecrated host, and drink his blood – the consecrated wine. Our visitor could be forgiven because he probably doesn't know that we receive the whole of Christ in either form. But by our actions we perhaps downplay the covenant significance of the Eucharist. God feeds us individually with heavenly bread, and feeds us communally, brings us once again into the covenant, with the heavenly wine, which we share from the same cup.

Many years ago when I was first ordained I gave a sermon on the Eucharist in which I stated that it was a symbol. Someone wrote a letter to the bishop accusing me of heresy, even though I had mentioned in the same sermon that the bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ. But even though that is the case, it is a symbol, nonetheless. When we receive the Eucharist, God is symbolizing his fatherly love for us, but we are symbolizing our desire to become more like His Son. Since the Resurrected Christ is one, when we receive his body and blood we are declaring, in a sense, that we want to be part of each other. We are all eating and drinking the same thing.

The host that we consume is made of greatly refined wheat, but what Jesus used was probably something like a soft taco or pita bread. It was necessary to eat the other things on the table. You didn't have utensils, so you tore off a piece of bread and dipped it in the food, or picked up a piece of food with it. Jesus means for us to see that the Eucharist is like that – it's what we have to have to be open to all the blessings God wants for us. The wine, on the other hand, would have been the best the apostles could have gotten. It was, after all, Passover, and the wine was part of a celebration. Jesus means the Eucharist to point toward that celebration in heaven, the great banquet to which we are all invited.

But symbols, even sacred symbols, do not really mean much unless they move us into some sort of action. We can be daily communicants, but if we are not trying to live out the meaning of the Eucharist, we won't get the sacramental graces.

On this feast of Corpus Christi, the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, let us remember that God loves us so much that he puts his whole self into the food he prepares for us. Let us pray that we respond to this love with our whole selves.

Trinity Sunday 2018

Matthew 28:16 – 20

I have a cousin who says that she is spiritual but not religious. I don't know quite what that means. I do suspect that she, like many other people today, find that they cannot believe in the God they imagine religion proclaims, but nevertheless intuit that there is something more than the material world. The word “spiritual” means that I believe there is something beyond what I can touch, feel, hear, see, or smell. The word “religious” seems to imply that there is a set of doctrines and practices that characterize those who adhere to the religion.

And there are many people today who fall into this category: spiritual but not religious. But being this way is a dead end. If there is something beyond the material world, so what? Does it have anything to do with how I live? Does it pertain to life after death? Does it impact on how I treat other people? Does is give me a direction in which to shape my own life? People who are spiritual but not religious have to start from scratch. They are missing out on all the great thinkers of the past who have traveled the same road.

One of the things many “spiritual but not religious” people have problems with is the concept of God. And I don't blame them. All of us have a picture in our minds of God – usually an old man with a long white beard. He may be a loving father or a vindictive punishing sort. Some of us call him the “Old Testament” God and we imagine this is the God of the Jews. But that simply means that we don't know the Old Testament very well, because that's where Jesus got his ideas about God.

Or we may see Jesus as God, and that's fine. After all, that's kind of an essential part of Christianity. Very few people who claim to follow Christ would deny that He is God. After all, rising from the dead is a pretty convincing demonstration if the miracles don't do it for you. But if Jesus is God why does he keep referring to God as His Father? Are Jesus and the Father different?

And in the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles, especially those of Saint Paul, It's pretty obvious that the early Christians experienced the presence of a person who helped them pray, who gave them courage, who was there when they preached; and they identified this presence with God, because Jesus had made it clear that he would send another advocate, that he would give his disciples the Holy Spirit who would be his spirit, the spirit who would live in the heart of the Church. And in the Hebrew scriptures, God breathes his spirit into creation, into the prophets, into Moses and the leaders of the people during the Exodus. Somehow the Spirit is God.

Today we celebrate the feast of the Holy Trinity. We can't explain this concept. If we try to explain the Trinity, we soon come to the paradox, the Spaghetti Monster in the sky. Once we explain the Trinity, we lost sight of God and set up an idol.

The Trinity is to be contemplated, not explained. It is to be looked upon, not analyzed. Like a great work of art that is never exhausted, that's kind of like the Trinity.

If a Muslim says that God is One, we Christians agree. If a Hindu says that God is in some way many, we Christians agree. God is one and God is a community.

If our Pentecostal brothers and sisters tell us that God moves among His people working signs and wonders, we have no problem with that, that's after all the promise of the Holy Spirit. If our Orthodox friends point out the complete otherness of God, the holiness which is unapproachable, we agree. And if our brother Christians tell us that God became a human being, we have no problem; in fact, we tell them that God became bread and wine, so that we could actually feed on him, because he cares so much for us that he wants to give our bodies and our souls his own person. He wants us the be like him, in fact he wants us to become him.

Don't try to analyze the Trinity. Don't be taken in by that book, “The Shack” which describes the three persons. But don't be taken in by Thomas Aquinas, either, whose formulation of the Trinity can't help but put images in our minds that make us think of God as three beings. The thing to remember is that whatever you say about God is probably mostly wrong. We who are creatures limited by time and space cannot fathom the source of all that is, the one for whom there is no time or space. Our minds just aren't equipped. All we can do is stand in wonder.

And that's enough. It's enough for us to pick out little things from the Trinity to apply to our own lives. The Trinity runs on love, and so should we. To the extent that we love, we share in the most powerful force there is. The Trinity is endlessly fruitful; and so should we be. Love, after all, is just a word unless it bears fruit, unless it changes something for the better. The Trinity makes the Universe out of Love, we can at least help each other to draw closer to Love. The Trinity tells us that true power lies in emptying oneself out. The characteristic common to the three persons is complete self-giving. That is what Jesus showed us about God on the Cross. The Trinity tells us that when persons come together to accomplish something they desire, there is more power than when someone tries to do something alone. And each person of the Trinity desires exactly what the others desire; they are of one mind. And we see how powerful were the apostles when they began the church. The Acts of the Apostles talks about the early Christians being of one mind, sharing all things.

So my cousin, who is spiritual but not religious, probably does not believe in a personal God. But we don't either; we believe in a three-personal God, a God who to our poor human minds is a God of utter simplicity and at the same time a God of contradictions and complexity. In short, a God who cannot be described in words. And now and then when we are well rested and up to the task, we should stand in awe of the Trinity and ask our God to reveal a little bit more of himself to us, not to satisfy our curiosity, but to show us something to imitate – because we are made in the image and likeness of the Trinity.

Pentecost 2018

John 14: 15-16, 23b-26

I've known a lot of permanent deacons. Most of us have one thing in common. There was a time when we heard a little nagging voice telling us to look into being a deacon, and we ignored it – sometimes for a very long time, before finally giving in. I first thought about it when I took care of a man whose son was one of the first deacons ordained in our diocese. I was busy with my medical career and pushed the idea down into my subconscious. It kept popping up. Several years went by and my life became busier. I had six kids and was running a department at Baystate Medical Center. I also was seeing a full load of patients, and trying to expand our department's efforts into Greenfield and Ware. In this, perhaps the busiest part of my life so far, I finally gave in to the pressure. The Holy Spirit was pushing me in a direction I didn't want to go. If you want a nice quiet life, don't listen to the Holy Spirit!

So it's that one day of every year that we turn our attention to the Holy Spirit. And we will be happy next Sunday when we can get back to God as Trinity, and then Jesus as our food and drink, and then march through the year contemplating the life of Jesus. We can handle that. But the Holy Spirit is kind of scary. It seems that if we let him get too close, he does things to us; he makes us go where we don't want to go. I don't think Jesus wanted to be driven into the desert at the beginning of his ministry – but that's exactly what the Holy Spirit did. . I'm not sure the Blessed Mother wanted to be an unwed mother in a small town where people were always looking for someone to talk about, but the Holy Spirit didn't ask. The angel said, “He will overshadow you”. We see a lot of examples in the Acts of the Apostles when the Holy Spirit pushed the followers of Jesus around, making them defy the leaders of the Jews, making them disrupt the peace all over the empire. They knew that if they followed the promptings of the Spirit, it might end up badly. And that is still true – if you let the Spirit in, he will probably make you go where you do not want to.

Look at our readings. If you were a frightened apostle in a locked room, and Jesus appeared in the room, you would probably be quaking in your boots. But after he comforts you, he promises to send the Holy Spirit – or as we used to call him in the olden days when I was a kid, the Holy Ghost. Somehow that isn't as reassuring as it should have been. “You're going to send us a ghost to keep us company, Lord?” And in the reading from Acts, here the apostles have been spinning their wheels wondering what they are supposed to do now? And again they are gathered in a room, when fire and wind appear, and seemingly push them into action, out into the crowds, to the very temple at the center of Israel, where they begin to preach, where foreign languages are coming out of their mouths, where most astonishingly, people are listening.

So when we really think about the Holy Spirit, one of the things he brings besides grateful coolness from the heat, as the Sequence says, is the shaking up of lives. And if you are like me, you don't want that. You want things to be predictable, you want to do God's will, of course, but on your terms; and if you hear the Spirit pushing you to do something new, something outrageous, something totally out of character, if you are like me, you say, “I need a sign, Holy Spirit! After all, maybe you are just a hallucination, maybe you are just wishful thinking.”

And sadly, if I am reasonably satisfied with the way things are, even if they aren't perfect, the unpredictability of the Spirit is if anything an annoyance. Maybe if I don't bother God, he won't bother me. Maybe if I go to church and say my prayers and stay out of serious sin, he will leave me alone and let me get on with life. If tongues of fire appeared over your heads, I'd probably call the fire department.

But sometimes I am nagged by the knowledge that things aren't the way they should be, not in my life, not in the life of my family, not in society at large; and I see that there is something, some little thing that I could do to push things in the right direction. Someone is nagging me. And that's when I wish I could remember that those apostles, who hadn't been able to get their act together out of fear, out of a desire to avoid change – remember how Peter told his brother apostles after the Resurrection, after his joy at seeing Jesus return from the dead, – Peter said, “I am going fishing”. Not only were they pushed into action, but in that very moment they were assured that God was with them. And Saint Paul, after a lifetime of being pushed around by the same Spirit, was able to say, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” Can there be any more joyful thought?

And here we sit, in our church, waiting—for God knows what. And the question is: Are we satisfied with the way things are? In our lives, in our world, in our church? If so, the Holy Spirit is very likely to leave us alone. We can safely read these lessons and say a few kind words about the Holy Spirit and be safe for another year.

But if we are aching and yearning for something more, if we look upon our lives and upon our world and upon our church with a combination of fear and hope, fearing that things won’t get better and hoping in our heart of hearts that they will, then we had best watch out. It is entirely likely that the Holy Spirit will soon burst upon us, leading us somewhere we did not know we wanted to go.

Seventh Sunday of Easter, cycle B

John 17:11 - 19

In Genesis after God creates everything, he looks at it and calls it “very good”. And in the Gospel of John, we have that famous bible verse, chapter 3, verse 16: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” And yet, here we have Jesus talking in terms that seem to split his disciples off from the world. The world, Jesus says, hates them because they are not of the world any more than He is of the world. And yet Jesus does not pray that we will be taken out of the world, but rather, that we will be protected from the world. In fact he sends us into the world.

So what is this seeming contradiction? Does it mean that Jesus used the word “world” in a different way that those other passages? I think if that were the case people could have done a better job translating. I think the word is deliberate.

We human beings are part of nature, part of the world. That is basically a good thing. We share something with all other material creatures. Every creature has a “nature” and humans are no exception. Human nature got to be the way it is through evolution. And anyone who knows a little history could probably name components of human nature. They include good things like self-preservation, forming families and tribes – looking after each other. The instinct to be a father or a mother, to work to give our children better lives than we've had; even the instinct to worship God. But there are bad things about human nature as well – fear of strangers; the tendency to see the world as a zero sum game where we need to struggle to get our share; and the desire to be respected, or at least not to be disrespected. We humans, especially males, have an instinct to form hierarchies, where those on the top use those below.

And it's hard to believe, but God loves humanity, including human nature. We see some of God's friends in the Old Testament being all too human. Abraham and David commit adultery; Jacob lies to his father and cheats his brother; Judah sleeps with his daughter in law. David commits murder. And yet God continues to love them and bestow blessings on them.

But his greatest blessing was to become one of us. Jesus tells his followers that they are not of the world because he gave them the word of the Father – so that their joy may be complete.

Jesus shows us through word and example the next step in human evolution and calls us to literally change our nature. No more us vs. them, no more exploiting other people, no more fearing the stranger, no more operating on the idea that there isn't enough for everybody so I better get mine. Jesus calls us to a fundamental unity, one in which all human beings can take part, a unity which includes Jesus – God Himself.

How do we become “not of this world?” We have to practice being different. And there are two dangers. One is, as someone said, to be different but make ourselves a small target. We can do this by equating religion with social work or self-help. Who can hate that? Certainly not the world. Nobody will crucify you if you are harmless, turned inward, and your religion consists of doing good. Some people, as you know, are critical of Pope Francis because they think this is the kind of faith he is preaching, a faith in which everyone gets the benefit of the doubt.

The other danger is to withdraw from the world. We can be like the Amish and have very little to do with the rest of humankind, and we see that tendency all over the world when it comes to religion. Every religion has a group of people who are trying to avoid contamination by people who are not as religious as they are. We can withdraw mentally as well. We can have a secret knowledge that only those who are saved can participate in. And we can make that knowledge a condition for belonging. We Catholics do that a little bit.

One of the ancient rabbis told a wonderful story about a man who came to a small town. He noticed that everyone was barefoot, even though there was snow on the ground. He asked his carriage driver, why are you barefoot, don't you know about shoes? The driver replied that he did. Why aren't you wearing them? The driver said, yes, that would be a good thing. The visitor found that the same question got the same answer; general agreement that shoes were a good thing, but no one was wearing them.. Finally he met someone who said, “We have a shoe factory in town, and every week they tell us how good it would be for us to wear shoes. And we all agree.”

We have been sent into the world to continue Christ's mission of creating a new humanity, a new human nature. It can be done – that's what we mean by a saint. It requires more than agreeing with the word that Jesus gave us. We have to practice, we have to know how to be different, yes, but then we have to be different, and that requires an act of the will.

It would sure be nice to have shoes – the shoe people tell us about a few people who wear shoes and their feet are warm and they can walk on gravel without pain. Someday maybe I'll get some shoes.

And Jesus tells us that he has given us his father's word and this makes us not of this world. And if we listen to him we see how this new way of being human is different from the old way. But if we are to be consecrated in truth, we have to practice this difference. And he wants us to show this new way to other people, that's why he sent us into the world. And of course he promises that if we become new people, if we take on a nature that is molded by the Holy Spirit instead of evolution, we will have joy.

But it's hard, and that's why he prays for us.

Sixth Sunday of Easter, cycle B

John 17:11 –19

God is love, John tells us. Love one another as I have loved you, Jesus says. Remain in my love, Jesus tells us. And he promises that his joy will be in us and our joy will be complete. When I read these two readings, I feel as though I am entering a bottomless pit. The words are simple, but the more you dwell on them, the less understanding. And probably the biggest question is not what Jesus means by love, but whether we have the love he is talking about.

God is love, for example. What comes to your mind? I'll bet it's a man with a beard and a white gown maybe smiling and holding out his arms? Or maybe it's Jesus inviting us into paradise. But John did not say, “God has love” or “God loves”. So how do we understand that God is love?

Love as someone said, is a verb, it is not a thing. And the way to see that God is love is to remember that God is Trinity, at least that's the best way we can understand what we are talking about. Because the very essence of the Trinity has to do with each person emptying himself out into the other, who in turn empties himself out into the third, and so on. This giving one's whole self to the other defines God; the whole giving of self defines each person. You could say that the only difference between the persons lies in their relationship to each other. And John tells us in plain terms that God loved us first; love spills over from the trinity and creates the universe.

Jesus further defines love: He in fact is the definition of love, in that he gave himself up for us. And he tells us that we will remain in his love as long as we keep his commandments. And his commandment is “love one another”.

And I think we can probably conclude that what Jesus is talking about, what John is talking about, has to do with how much we give up ourselves. It is not a feeling, it is not that we somehow equate praying and piety and good behavior with loving. Not the same thing at all. And it isn't that we equate love with good deeds. How are we giving ourselves up?

It's astounding, but God, the Trinitarian God, wants the same relationship with you and I that exists in the Trinity, a relationship in which there is mutual emptying and filling up. C.S. Lewis was of the opinion that this doesn't happen all at once or all the time. It is necessary each day to offer yourself to God, but shortly afterward, we find we have taken back what we offered. Over time if we persist, we do better at letting go of ourselves, and to the extent that we make room, God can work in us to put himself in the space we have made. God's love consists of taking a creature with free will, you and I, with a strong streak of selfishness, because we are bodies, because we evolved this way, because we share that self-centeredness with all conscious creatures – and transforming us into his Son.

CS Lewis says that this is a very hard thing for a human being to do – not because it's hard to become Jesus – it's impossible for you and I to accomplish. What makes it so hard is that once we allow God to begin working on us, even a little bit, our progress will do two things; first, it will make us feel righteous, because perhaps we have conquered our anger, or developed a little humility, or stopped abusing our spouses. Second, there will be a point where we say, thank God, I've gotten rid of those parts of my make up that are disturbing, negative, those things that keep me from being good. Now, God, you can go work on someone else, I'm done.

The point of course, is that God is never done. Once you put yourself in his hands, once you allow him to love you, he will not leave you alone – unless you break off your relationship with him. So being loved by God, who is willing to do all the work of love, is not easy.

But to the extent that you are loved and return that love, as with God it will spill over, into acts of love for your neighbor, and indeed acts of love for God. Those are consequences.

Human beings by nature worry about respect, freedom from pain and suffering, having enough “stuff”. We are attracted to things that give us pleasure, sometimes to our great detriment. And as long as these very natural inclinations motivate our lives and actions, we will never be happy, we will never have joy.

Our joy becomes complete when we completely empty ourselves in love. Will we be able to do this during this life? Probably not. If we are still motivated by those natural inclincations, to that extent we will need further work by God in us, and that is painful, and if it takes place after we die, it is what we call purgatory. If on the other hand we act as though we are motivated by love, over time, we will be. I think there's a great insight in the Church's attitude to martyrdom, defined as being put to death because of one's faith. If I die because I am a Christian, even a very imperfect one, then I am giving up everything for love of God. No wonder I am considered a saint, no wonder everything is forgiven me. Love of God, love of neighbor, emptying myself out for someone else, that is the goal. And every time we do such a thing, even if it is small, we become a little more like God.

Jesus knows that true joy can fill us to the extent that we are empty. We cannot bring about our own joy, because we confuse joy with many other transitory emotions. But Jesus tells us that he has the answer, that he wants to give us his own joy, so that our joy may be complete.

So simple, yet so hard.