A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.
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In today’s gospel (John 16: 5-11), we continue to listen to
Jesus’ discourse after the Last Supper, further explaining His mission, the
mission of the Holy Spirit, and the path that lay ahead of the apostles who, in
just a little over fifty days, would inherit His mission to the rest of the
world. They are sad but, Jesus explains, He must leave so that they may receive
another Helper who will enlighten the world about sin, righteousness, and
judgement. Let us leave aside the last mysterious remark for another reflection
and focus instead on Jesus’ even more mysterious remark at the beginning:
It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I
do not go away, the Helper will not come to you.
The Helper here is better known in Christian discourse as
the Paraclete, but what can Jesus mean by this conditional phrase: If I do
not go away, He will not come? Cannot God do everything? Have we reached
here the limits of One we formerly called the Almighty? Indeed, if He is to go
away, must we not also wonder that Jesus would later say that He will be with
them always, even to the end of the world? Our Saviour is as ever enigmatic. He
is not an instruction booklet to be unfolded and skimmed by simplistic minds.
He is the Truth whose words cut to the very quick of those who are blessed
enough, and who dare, to raise their eyes to look for Him, even the simple. What then does He
mean here? Let us dare to ask …
Jesus, who is with us always in the Eucharistic presence,
has yet gone away in His historical presence; He has left the ambit of our planet
in the cosmos not by His presence and power but only in the physical dimension
of His incarnation. Body and blood He remains with us, but sacramentally only,
i.e. under other physical appearances that are signs of an unseen reality and that
make real His presence. We are amazed at those who looked upon the Babe and saw
the Saviour of the World, but everyone who professes their belief in the Eucharist
performs an even greater wonder of faith, looking upon a fragment of what appears
to be bread and by faith knowing – discerning, as St Paul says – mysteriously
but overwhelmingly the real presence of the Lord.
But, why then would the Paraclete not have come if Jesus had
not left us in the historical, material and physical sense? Imagine the impact.
We would not be going to Rome to see the pope but to see Jesus Himself! Perhaps
He would have continued to perform miracles! Would not the whole world have
been converted in a carnival of conviction? Would not the Trumps and Ayatollahs
of War have bent their knees to the peacemaker? Would not the Dawkins and the Frys
have had their every doubt solved like Nicodemus in the night? In other words,
did Jesus get it wrong? Surely, He needed a better PR strategy! Think how close
His kingdom was, instead of which He left its fate in the hands of the amateurs,
the illiterates, and – worst of all - the zealots!
But I think we need to temper this enticingly counterfactual
history of Christianity, of what might have been, and not only because sometimes these things are
mysterious and held under the veil of His inscrutable wisdom. Just look at
Israel at the time of Jesus. Not everyone believed. Indeed, the maddening thing
about those privileged witnesses of the steps of the Messiah is that so many of
them saw and yet remained unmoved; or else they saw and yet stopped seeking for
Him when they encountered a difficulty; or else their hearts were pitted
against Him from the beginning, and the more He showed Himself to be who He
was, the more they sank in their satanic resistance. The counterfactual idea
the whole world would have converted had Jesus stayed needs to be consigned to
the garbage dump of history, along with the comfortable notion that everybody
is sincere, everybody means well, and that good will is everywhere. It is not
that we judge hearts - that is God's business; rather, it is that the gospel has taught us to understand that
there is a lot more going on in the average human heart than appears on the
surface…
And that is the point, indeed perhaps the very reason why
Jesus had to go. A physically present Jesus performing regularly in Rome like P.
T. Barnum in his circus ring would have risked making it possible for the world
to carry on with its surface level engagement with His message. The world would
have been like Pontius Pilate who was physically present to the Lord but whose
heart seemingly remained closed. Perhaps worst of all, a physically present
Jesus from whom we could be physically distant might have made us think we had
no deep work to do in our own hearts. But our illness is of another kind.
What a wonder such a continuing physical presence of Jesus would have
been, except that it is dwarfed utterly by the even greater wonder that the Lord
through the Spirit now accompanies every single one of us on those inner paths within, down the
valleys and abysses of our own hearts, to bring us to knowledge of our own great
woundedness and of His infinitely greater power to heal and to raise us up after sin.
Lost in the raging waters of discordant needs, undue attachments and blood-red revolt,
we are rescued time and again by the Fisher King of souls, the one and the same
God who created the world, took flesh in Jesus Christ, and who comes to us to
recreate us anew if we will but walk these paths with Him, follow the surgeon’s
knife and allow Him to cut out the poison, and replace it with His infinite
goodness. And thus we will pray in the exquisite poetry of the Pentecost
Sequence:
Lava quod est sordidum, (Cleanse what is unclean),
Riga quod est aridum, (water what is parched),
sana quod est saucium, (heal what is wounded).
Flecte quod est rigidum, (Bend what is inflexible),
fove quod est frigidum, (warm what is chilled),
rege quod est devium (correct what has gone astray).
If He had not gone away, would He work such wonders now
within us? And that is the point.
In His going away, we have paradoxically a sign and a promise
of His visitation.
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