Overcoming the world

 A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (John 16: 29-33) comes again from the discourse after the Last Supper and really breaks down into two sections. In the first, the apostles declare that they know who Jesus is because, they say, He has spoken plainly. Now, they can declare He came from God. In the second section, Jesus responds to their profession by a disconcerting prophecy about their inconstancy. Nevertheless, He assures them that in the end all their troubles need not discourage them for He has conquered the world.

As in so many parts of the gospel, we find in this extract the followers of the Lord looking desperately for anchor points to which they can attach themselves, measures by which they can walk. Jesus has often spoken in parables. In this very discourse, He has spoken in sometimes mystical language. In the words He speaks just before this extract begins, it is not especially clear in fact that He has spoken more plainly. Perhaps what matters more here is it the apostles believe that He has spoken plainly. And when their profession comes, when they say that this is why we believe that you came from God, it comes perhaps with just a soupcon of pride. The apostles are still in a kind of rabbinical school mode, labouring over their teacher’s words with the aim of mastering them. We know there was competition amongst them for the top seats; perhaps there was also competition amongst them to be top of the class. And yet this attitude too was far from appropriate. They had always wanted to walk by their own lights and found themselves frustrated time after time by being unable to map the logic of the Lord they thought they knew. It is so interesting to observe that many words about faith which come from the hearers of the Lord come from those outside this inner circle. Lord, I believe; help my unbelief, says the father of the boy possessed; only say the word and my servant will be healed, says the centurion who is not even a Jew.

In this scene, in sum, the apostles’ human confidence was high, and they were ready to declare they had understood His origins. And how did the Lord respond to their apparent progress? By prophesying their failure:

Behold, the hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, each to his own home, and will leave me alone.

The Lord is unimpressed by this self-measurement of the apostles. He is unimpressed by our own self-assessment. He wants our honesty, not our exaltation. And yet these sentiments would be difficult to decipher in the apostles’ words had not the Lord punctuated their declaration with the ironic question: do you now believe? There is a paradox here, as there so often is in the gospel. The Lord enlightens us, but it is not up to us to measure the light, nor to issue our own tasting notes for the delights of the Lord. This is the mistake of the apostles. Now you are speaking plainly and not using figurative speech! sounds like the beginning of a profession of faith, but there is something too self-congratulatory in their observation. It almost sounds like they are saying: now we get it; now we master it; now we can run on our own; now we are sufficiently prepared. This then is perhaps why the Lord serves their hubris with a prophecy to deflate them on the spot.

What are we to learn from this error of the apostles if not that not all those who believe they are making progress are really making progress? The lights the Lord gives us should be held like treasures to be cherished, not wielded like tools as if we were suddenly artisans of distinction. The problem here is not only a lack of humility on our part; it is that our ways are not the Lord’s ways. All our efforts to be worthy and to be ready for the service that He calls us to are only part of the story in which we become the docile instruments of his Kingdom. The foundation of that story is not our competence, and it is not even our loving and humble gaze upon the Lord, although this is our chief duty. Rather, He is the foundation and He is our sufficiency; unless the Lord builds the house, they labour in vain who build it. It does not matter how good our intentions are, nor how right our cause is. Our peace must come through Him; not through our own appraisal of our selves. Even then our spiritual sterility, our inability to convert the world and call it to His service, cannot be a measure of our failure: the Lord reaps where He has not sown, and gathers where He did not scatter. They also serve who only stand and wait.

If these realities are a blow to our pride, we can take consolation in the assurances that Jesus gives to the disciples: I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. Undoubtedly, this was a consolation first given to his own mother who, at the moment when she said to Him in Jerusalem: Child, why have you treated us like this? must have had time to reflect on the limitations of her own nature. She, above all the children of God, possessed docibilitas in the highest degree, and yet the Lord allowed her to undergo this trial, perhaps to give her a taste of something that every other human knows by personal experience: the bitterness and desolation of losing the Lord.

To follow her example and that of the apostles, it only remains for us to let the Lord overcome the world, especially where it lodges in our hearts and minds.