A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (John 15: 9-11) is what jewellers call a
melee – a micro-jewel of precious stone. Barely more than half a dozen lines,
it further explains the relationship of the Son to the Father and its parallels
with our relationship to the Son. Through doing His will, which is also that of
the Father, we abide in His love. As in all things, we the disciples are called
to be where the Master is, and since He is in the obedience of the Father, so
too must we be. But then comes the crowning jewel of this passage which can
only be cited in full:
These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in
you, and that your joy may be full.
This is one of the quintessential COLW gospels, the maturation
as it were of the Magnificat. Bathing in the memory of the Angelic message, Mary
once confessed to Elisabeth her rejoicing in the Saviour. Her joy came from the
very depths of her spirit and carried her on through the difficulties of her
pregnancy, the challenges of life in Egypt and Nazareth, and all along the road
to the foot of Calvary. Then, mingled though it was with pain, how could her
joy cease even there, since her Saviour was ever living? Like the sorrowing
soul of Jesus on the cross, Mary’s sorrows were but her passage through the
tumult of this life. As Henry Scott-Holland, the friend of Chesterton, wrote on
the topic of a royal death:
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet
again!
Mary’s furrow was set, and she ploughed on. Her trajectory,
her journey, and always her very essence was that of rejoicing in the Lord, the
fount of eternal love and, therefore, of eternal peace, joy, and mercy, the
fruits of love.
So, now, thirty-three years later, in this quiet upper room
on the night of the Passover, Jesus who received so much from His Mother - to
whom of course He had already given everything - Jesus shares His joy with the
apostles gathered around him.
But note the nuances here: these things I have spoken to
you. We must earn to listen for we are often guilty of not hearing others.
And yet our first and ever-present duty is to listen to the Lord when He speaks.
The rule of St Benedict whose order planted the seeds of Christian Europe opens
with the following lines:
Listen, my son, to your master's precepts, and incline
the ear of your heart.
Listening is of the essence of obedience, the obedience of
the Son to the Father and of the disciple to the Son. This is the first
condition of joy: that it begins in an open obedience, an obedient openness to
the Eternal Word, spoken in the communion of God’s love and shared with us through
His mercy. This law of listening, however, also devolves upon the suppliant,
upon those who need to be heard, for whatever their wounds and burdens, they
cannot be healed without the reconciliation in obedience that plunges its roots
into the obedience of the Son to the Father.
Jesus has spoken of this obedience to the Father, therefore,
that my joy may be in you.
Here is the Lord once again, ever faithful, ever the same, sharing
not only His love, but its inevitable fruit of joy – joy eternal, living joy, the
joy that transports and transforms. How can it be otherwise when it is His joy?
What is this joy of Jesus if not the joy of the vision of
the Blessed Trinity in His human soul which, because He is now incarnate in
human flesh, a wayfarer in this life, as well as a contemplator of the Divine
Mystery, finds and takes joy in every mountain top and flower petal, in every
rainfall and glorious sunset, in what Gerard Manley-Hopkins calls the dearest
freshness deep down things and, most especially, in the features of men’s
faces where He looks constantly to find the reflection of His Father? This
is His joy, a joy that is renewed and refreshed in His labour of redemption, to
restore to those faces the image of the Father marred through sin and
disobedience. For even the labour of repair is a joy, for it is a restoration,
and as Fulton Sheen reminds us, broken things are precious. What makes
us perfect is not perfection conceived in a narrowly human sense but our union
with Him who works His perfect work in us according to His mercy.
And then at last comes the final nuance in Jesus’ address: that
your joy may be full. Jesus never spoke of His ecstatic aspirations for His
followers more clearly than in that moment. All the feeble tsunamis of sexual
ecstasy that have turned the heads of disobedient man since the dawn of lust
are but pale and wayward imitations of the hallowing love of God who desires to
give Himself to us:
Many waters cannot quench love,
neither can floods drown it.
So speaks the wisdom of Solomon. Yet these paradoxical lines
of the Song of Songs express also our failure to capture that
irresistible and unconquerable torrent of love that flows at this moment from
the Heart of Christ: that your joy may be full.
That our joy may be full: this is the gift He offers to us,
to draw us by His mercy into the eternal mystery where our praise of His glory
may harmonise with the very song of the heart of our God.
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