Standing firm

Today’s gospel (Matthew 24: 4-13) has both a collective sense and an individual application for us. Jesus speaks about world history, but His words also apply to our individual histories. And in a sense, it is only the latter that matters.

For whatever is happening all around us, whether we live in an age of Christian flourishing or an age of spiritual winter, we must – as the wretched anticlerical Voltaire said – attend to our own garden.

Never mind the grand conspiracies on the world stage: what deceits prosper in our own heart? How much do we lend an ear to agitations and agitators? How much do we let our faith be overwhelmed by the earthquakes around us, or by officious bullies who wield power in both Church and State? Our only consolation in these tumults should be the fidelity of Jesus to us. If we take consolation and strength in our own sense of self, in our rank or in the strength and rank of others, we are in danger of being let down.

“Then they will hand you over to be tortured and put to death.” In A Man for All Seasons, Richard Rich is desperate for Thomas More to give him a hand up in society, but when Rich claims that he would be faithful, Thomas tells him: “Richard, you could not answer for yourself, even so far as tonight.” Rich is a man with his faith in the upper classes, but he has no self-knowledge. He lives in deceit – deceit about himself and deceit about others – and thus, it is no surprise to find him involved as an agent in the handing over of More to his persecutors.

As one French mystic says, “Beware those who are in flight from themselves…” in flight because they too live in deceit about themselves and about the world around them. Love only grows cold in those who have embraced deceit – about themselves and about others – and are in flight. And where deceit waxes and love grows cold, so persecutions follow.

We think of persecutors with snarling faces like those who crucify Jesus in Gustave Dore’s engravings, but we only need look in the mirror to find a potential persecutor – a persecutor of others or indeed of ourselves. It is easier than we think to hate the self; grace means to forget ourselves, or at least to love ourselves only with the humble love of the Man God, free from deceit, averse to the lawlessness that follows on the loss of charity.

How many wasted hours do people spend over signs of the end and portents of things to come! Our challenge is here; the final act is now; the denouement of our lives may only be a breath away. In every moment of our lives, we have the chance to say ‘yes’ and ‘thank you’, like Mary did – Mary who beheld clearly on Calvary the coldness of men’s hearts and the persecution of her Son.

But Mary had first known the peace of the house of Nazareth and the gentle labours of faithfulness in her own soul, the soul of her spouse, and the soul of the Son she raised. We only need to stand firm with her (and with saints like More and Fisher). 

On vengence and ducks

Today's gospel (Matt 5: 38-42) sees Jesus again in rhetorical mode, like last Friday. In this passage, however, he piles example on example, all of which go towards making one essential point: do not return evil for evil. And yet, while Jesus does not want us to take revenge, there is another lesson hidden in these lines that in a sense goes more deeply into our behaviour. 

Of course, Jesus does not want us to take revenge: revenge is mine, says the Lord. We are often poor ministers of justice; we should leave it to providence to sort out most of our complaints. 

Yet as we read these injunctions in today's gospel, taken from the sermon on the mount, we get a hint of where the urge for revenge comes from. Look carefully at what Jesus asks: offer another cheek when one has received a blow; give away more than is asked of you; go not one mile but two miles out of your way. These are not just injunctions of avoidance; they involve the same kind of self-sabotaging subtlety as is found in the command not to let your right hand know what your left hand is doing, or to conceal your prayers and penance so as not to follow the Pharisees' example. Jesus is not just delivering a guide for living in these words. He is showing us something about our inner life. 

For the truth is that all but the holiest of us are calculators (and even holy people calculate a bit): we calculate the esteem we are owed and the goodness we are willing to pay out. We calculate how much we intend to punish others, or how fast our self-regard requires us to run away from danger. We are merchants of our own lunchtime fame, failing to see that the glory of the humblest thing is as mighty in Gods eyes as the glory of the greatest magnificence; that the rosebud and the giant redwood are in some regards equals. How much divine joy do we miss because we are busy calculating what is owed to us or what we are prepared to pay out?

We seize on some glorious quality granted us by God's gift and want unconsciously to square or cube it by our own self aggrandizement. We are slighted by the failure of others to appreciate us. Nothing seems as normal to us as our own entitlement. And when we become more conscious of the entitlement, we sometimes try to pay for its repression by an exaggerated abasement - which also involves a kind of calculation - as if our toleration of self-imposed bitterness was any less a form of pride than our naïve entanglements with vanity. 

In Jesus' command to give away our coat and tunic and go the extra mile, he gives us a means of disrupting this inner calculation, to turn over the tables of our internal trader and wreck the rule of such a currency exchange in our own hearts. What is worse than evil befalling us? That we should not live our misfortune according to God's lights but only according to our own calculations. This is why we are vengeful. Like greed, vengefulness already reveals an inner will to lay claim to things that are not ours. 

So, we must let go, and become what God intends us to be - we must live God's dream for us -  holding on to the good things of the earth (like coats and tunics) only as lightly as we hold on to the intangibles (our esteem and self-respect). 

And, so in conclusion, like F. W. Harvey, 

'From troubles of the world

I turn to ducks ...

***

When God had finished the stars and whirl of coloured suns
He turned His mind from big things to fashion little ones;
Beautiful tiny things (like daisies) He made, and then
He made the comical ones in case the minds of men
Should stiffen and become
Dull, humourless and glum,
And so forgetful of their Maker be
As to take even themselves - quite seriously.

Mastery of our souls

Today’s gospel (5: 27-32) is a reminder for us that we must always read the Sacred Scriptures with a wise eye and an ear firmly on Tradition. On the one hand, today’s gospel challenges us with teachings that are especially unpopular today, the literal sense of which some would like to deny; on the other hand, Jesus’ language is savage and apparently impossible to fulfil. How can we make sense of such tensions?

Jesus is not just any teacher; He is the Teacher, and He comes to share with us the revelation of the Father’s love. The moral laws which He teaches in this gospel - on purity of heart and mind, and on marriage as a life-long bond – are an expression of His wisdom. As He explains elsewhere, ‘in the beginning’, He made them male and female to be joined together for life.  

Yet, why does He give us these teachings on marriage and purity of heart? Simply because God wants us to be transformed by His life entirely, from our grandest actions to our most secret thoughts. Custody of the mind and heart, as Jesus teaches here, is not a nicety. It is an alignment of our inner appetites with the good things of God, a turning away from self-satisfaction to the fulfilment of free hearts, buoyed up by the Father’s love. The same holds true for life-long marriage. Jesus came to rescue all the ruins of life through His grace. Every sinner has a future, and every saint has a past; so says the ancient wisdom. Every Christian is bound by the law of dying-to-self so as to live to God. Even every happy marriage includes such dying-to-self as well, because true fulfilment emerges from self-gift rather than from self-pursuit. Who knows how many rocky marriages could have been saved had both partners known and listened to such a teaching? If we only stop seeking ourselves for a moment, what possibilities might we discover that come within our reach? The statistics bear this out; second marriages are more likely to fail than first marriages, and things get even worse for third and fourth marriages. People don’t become better judges of these things by throwing their spouses away; generally, they become worse. Some situations cannot be saved of course, but then the marriage bond live on, held in the merciful palm of Jesus to whom the promises were said in the first instance. For what is a vow but words we say to God?

Then comes the second part of this gospel: Jesus’ command to avoid sin at all costs. Here, as I said above, is where we need Tradition to help us: sometimes Jesus speaks in hyperbole. We may not sever our hands nor pluck out our eyes, even to avoid sin, so why does Jesus say this? Because He is using the rhetoric of a communicator who knows His words will not be taken literally: He is simply underlining His point! He does not mean we should harm ourselves; merely that we should do all we can to save ourselves from sin. What this means for each individual will differ. For some, it might mean never setting foot in a pub again; for another, it could mean getting rid of the TV. Translating it into one of today’s scenarios, if thy screen offends thee, put it in the bin! Better to enter eternity without a social media presence than to risk one’s soul for a little cheap digital dopamine shot.

Jesus, be master of our souls, for we cannot be heroes, nor yet be wise, without your all-healing grace.

Of persecution and pearls

Today’s gospel (Matthew 5: 1-12) gives us so many criteria by which we can identify those who belong to God: happy are the poor in spirit, happy the gentle, happy those who mourn, happy those who hunger…In a way this is the counter agenda to so many of the values that prevail around us: happy are the successful, happy are the comfortably well off, happy are those who know how to look after their own interests first, happy are those who express themselves... Jesus’ criteria are self-effacing, turned towards God and neighbour; the counter proposals of the world are self-seeking, turned towards the self, even when ostensibly turned to others, like the people who limit their families so the children can “have everything”.

Yet, for all the tension between these two sets of values, it is the last criterion of Jesus that is the most challenging for us. “Happy are you when people abuse you and persecute you … Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven.” It is not our nicer virtues that are the deepest proof of where our hearts are turned. Anyone can be enthusiastic for the pleasant or even the generous dimensions of the gospel - feeding the poor, being a peacemaker, showing mercy: all the accolades that are given to secular saints, as well as religious ones.

Yet, these qualities do not quite get to the roots of our heart. Ultimately, the following of Christ grows out of an act in which we give ourselves totally to God and wherein God becomes our joy. The fiat of sorrow, which we are required to say in the face of persecution, comes out of the fiat of joy which is the fruit of our love for Him. There where our hearts are, there will be our treasure also. Jesus is not saying we should be happy because of the abuse, but rather we have an additional cause to be happy when persecution comes and does not rob us of what we treasure most… But what if it does?

Insofar as persecution takes our joy and robs us of peace, perhaps that is the measure of how far we have to go yet before we are truly united to Him; of how much we must long and pray for that union with him. If suffering bends us all out of shape and traumatises us, perhaps that is because we are not yet fully surrendered to God and to the Father’s forming action. We may think we love the people around us, but the people we really love are those we refuse to be separated from, despite our suffering, despite what their love costs us. It is not the suffering that reveals who we are, therefore, but the steadiness of our hearts when the suffering comes: grace and joy under pressure, as we said in the last gospel reflection.

And so, perhaps another gospel parable that illuminates these Beatitudes is the story of the man who found a pearl in a field and went away and sold everything he had to buy the field. We think too easily about the pearl in this parable, of what a great pearl it must have been: literally a pearler! But what lies on the other side of the parable – the untold story - is everything the man sold in order to obtain the field with the pearl. What did he give up? What treasures did this man part with to obtain that pearl? How angry was his wife that he was selling up the family possessions? What a fool did his neighbours consider him? How much pity did he endure from his drinking buddies?

But he had found the pearl of great price. The questions of those around him made no sense. The pearl - a symbol of union with God - was now, he realised, everything he could ever desire or need in this world. 

The man was standing on a different horizon. 

And so must we.

Happy are you when people abuse you and persecute you…for this is how the persecuted the prophets before you.

Wisdom, courage and finally joy

Todays gospel (Mark 12:1-12) should be a source of wisdom and courage for the followers of Jesus. 

Wisdom and courage both consist in this: that the way of Christ is to rise in God's power after human defeat. This dynamic is at the heart of the parable Jesus relates of the man who plants a vineyard but whose tenants kill or beat all those who come to press the rights of the vineyard owner. Just as God sent the prophets to those who tended the vineyard of Israel, so the owner of this vineyard sent his representatives who were rejected one after one. In the end, they will not even accept his son...

Jesus of course tries to build bridges and so should we, but as this parable suggests, and as they say these days, the haters gonna hate. Sometimes we cannot save our friendship with God and our friendship with others: which should prevail? In the end fidelity to God is our compass, not bridge building with our neighbours, and when those we build bridges with cannot bear our friendship with God, they are only following the pattern of the vineyard's tenants. And what if our fidelity to God costs us dearly? What if it gets us thrashed or killed? Or cancelled and shunned? What if it leaves our credibility in tatters? Should we do a deal with the tenants so they leave us alone? Should we barter our fidelity for peace? Well, of course, we should not appoint ourselves as martyrs. God will choose the time for us. Here is where the wisdom lies: we think peace lies beyond cordial negotiations, but perhaps it only lies beyond our defeat. For only in defeat can God show us the power of His resurrection. Only in the defeat of our self sufficiency can God show us that, all along, He intended to be our sufficiency: we just could not see it.

And so here comes the courage. For it is one thing to acknowledge the wisdom of God in the vineyard but it is quite another to accept its logic for us. How do we surrender to the Father's forming action when that forming action delivers us up to a thrashing by the tenants or even some kind of death: death of friendships, death of reputation, or death of our human resourcefulness? Here too is where we need to say a fiat in sorrow, but even the fiat in sorrow builds on the fiat in joy, for sorrow will always be passing, a pure accident in our earthly transit, but joy, mercy and peace, the fruits of love, will be our song forever with God if only we are faithful to Him. Easter Sunday always lies beyond Good Friday.

Ernest Hemingway defined courage as grace under pressure. Perhaps the COLW definition should be grace and joy under pressure. 

This was the Lord's doing

And it is wonderful to see.

Precept and counsel, need and desire

 The strictures of today's gospel about how to go about preaching the gospel are so severe, one might be excused for feeling a little discouraged. "Carry no purse, no haversack, no sandals", is it, Lord? Well, we reason, maybe that works in Late Iron Age Palestine but spare a thought for twenty-first century Britain! But that would be wrong for at least three reasons. 

The first is that as we read the Scriptures, we should know that, at times, Jesus does use hyperbole when He speaks. Most of us probably understand that instinctively. Those who don't have already chopped off their hands or dug out their eyes in order to obey Jesus' command about what to do if we sin by hand or eye. Not all Jesus' apparent exaggerations can be attributed to hyperbole, like the number of times we must forgive. But others - like "Call no man 'Father' - fit that category precisely. Jesus' order here about no purse, no haversack and no sandals is a command about simplicity and bare minimum necessities, more than an order about the disciples' fashions.

The second reason it would be wrong is because it would depend on a fundamental confusion between precept and counsel, between a command and a better way. So much trouble comes to us by confusing these two things. For the habitual sinner, it seems easy to think that precept (a command) is merely a counsel, a piece of advice but not an obligation. Jesus cannot really mean that, can He? He said He came to make us free after all!

On the other hand, for those who have made a little more progress in the spiritual life, the opposite is true: they can easily confuse counsel for precept. In Jesus' day, it was the Pharisees who were perhaps most guilty of this, but it is a vice that can afflict those who are a lot nicer than the Pharisees. We see this when people become zealous about some devotion or other, and act as if they have been called to spread it through the whole world. Those who mistake counsel for precept become merchants of religious enthusiasm, not understanding that enthusiasm in a religious key is a kind of lack of freedom. It wants to draw its power from passion, and not from grace; it instinctively puffs itself up into a feel-good fuzziness (or perhaps a feel-righteous fuzziness) instead of waiting for the breath of the Holy Spirit. It would take those words of Jesus about going without sandals and purse and turn them into a hammer to crush the weakness of lesser Christians. Those who mistake counsel for precept are the spiritual Marthas of this life who are unwittingly anxious about many things, whereas they believe they are the ones serving the Lord with all their busyness. Yet they miss the one thing necessary; they lack the simplicity of Mary.

Which brings us nicely to the third reason why we cannot just overlook these words of Jesus: they are meant to help us discern between what it is we want and what it is we really need. We need many things in this life, as our Father in Heaven knows, but what we want and the way in which we want them can come between us and our following of Christ. We are right to deny the abusiveness of the religious enthusiasts who want to turn counsels into precepts and place on our shoulders the burdens of their enthusiasms. And yet, if we do not distinguish rightly between our needs and our desires, we are likely to remain just as worldly as those who do not profess to follow Jesus. Our legitimate freedoms can become our seductions. We can believe we are good for our occasional penances, whereas God might look on our indulgences as so many acts of betrayal because to those to whom much is given, much is rightly expected. Our simplicity can become an oversimplification or simply naivety, especially about our lower passions and their entrapments. Jesus told us to take up our cross, and that too is a precept. 

The challenge is that some counsels do indeed become precepts. We are all called to poverty, chastity and obedience, but if we take a vow to embrace them, they become precepts to us (understanding that chastity is fundamentally always a matter of precept in its essence). Yet in another way, counsel may become precept by some inspiration or perhaps through our own personal vocations which the Holy Spirit gives us to understand. This is when we must listen so carefully to the Holy Spirit and pray to discern His commands with wisdom. 

In the end, whether we are among the seventy-two disciples sent out or those who remain behind to hold the fort and pray for them, we need all to know the difference between precept and counsel, to abstain from placing our own burdens on the shoulders of others, and to watch closely that our freedoms do not become an excuse for waywardness. And then, our first words will always be, "Peace be to this house."

Indulgent pragmatism or transformative love

Today’s gospel (Mark 10:1-12) offers us two profound truths of the spiritual life that can nourish us on a daily basis.

Why did Moses allow the Jews to divorce? Jesus says explicitly that it was because they were unteachable. Another translation expresses this as the hardness of their hearts. Yet, the challenge for us, especially in COLW, is to look hard at ourselves and wonder: where are we guilty of the same hardness? Where do we show ourselves unteachable?

Unteachability may show itself in major matters, as in the question over marriage and divorce. Or it may show itself in small matters. In those who commit to a more devout life, perhaps unteachability goes along with a way of living through which our eyes are more focused on ourselves than on the divine horizon ahead of us. In that sense, being unteachable means not looking towards our Divine Teacher. Instead, we look to ourselves and our own supposed self-sufficiency, or else we judge our actions merely by our own lights, be they indulgent or severe. Who can learn in those circumstances? O that today you would harden not your hearts. Such is the appeal we hear in the Psalms. O that today we would be teachable, and be all ears for the lessons of the Master.

One objection that might be raised as we read this gospel is to wonder whether Jesus is less merciful than Moses. After all, Moses allows divorce and Jesus doesn’t. Therefore, Moses shows mercy and … Jesus doesn’t?  How can that be?

Yet this brings us to another profound truth of the spiritual life in today’s gospel: Jesus comes not just to govern us but to transform us.

God’s creation is not the work of a manufacturer who designs his invention, sets it running, and then wanders away. Creation is suffused not only with God’s presence but with His wisdom and inner working; with the attention of its Divine Lover who cares for all things in their right order. The Divine Law is not imposed on the world as some exoskeleton but is intrinsic to it by God’s design; all things are possible with God except those that are contrary to His nature. He could not design a world in which He worships us, for example. In this sense, Moses is but a technician of the Law; his ruling on divorce is like the work of a mechanic who finds the inventor’s machine malfunctioning and does a botch job until he can work out a better solution. Moses was not responsible for the Law. He was merely its guardian, even when he made this exception about divorce.

But Jesus is no technician of the law; He is its author. The indissolubility of marriage is wedded to how God designed the sexes. In this sense, it is not that He is less merciful than Moses. Rather, He is giving us something more than Moses could ever offer: the call to be transformed by His grace in a new life of divine intimacy and friendship.

Moses’s mercy is the mercy of the pragmatist managing the appearances.

Jesus’ mercy belongs to another dimension. He takes us through the darkest valleys where we must die to ourselves only to lead us to the sunlit uplands of the Resurrection.

Are we tempted by the pragmatism of Moses rather than the transformative call that Jesus offers us? O that the Almighty had not fixed His canon against self-slaughter, says Shakespeare’s despairing Hamlet. In our darker moments, we might be able to taste such bitterness.

But, could we ever say O that the Almighty had not offered us His deepest, transforming love and His abiding friendship? After Jesus' death and all His labours, such a plea would be shaped by the indulgent malice of hell.

A day in the life of Mary

 Today’s blog (John 19:25-34) sees Mary stood beneath the cross of Jesus, receiving John her son (and in him all those who are born spiritually of Mary), witnessing Jesus’ death, and His final indignity of having a spear driven through His side. And in such a scene, we see her become the Mother of the Church with a motherhood that far exceeds anything we have known or experienced in this life.

Mary is our model, standing before the cross of Jesus. This spectacle is the condition of her joy, for there is no longer any victory over sin and evil in this word except along the path driven by the Saviour through the heart of Satan’s kingdom. Victory – and the woman shall crush the head of the serpent, not as the flesh of Eve and of her fallen sons and daughters but as the first fruit of the New Adam in the name of whose merits she was preserved from all stain of original son. Her immaculate vocation, her glorious vocation, was the call to be His mother and in Him, the Mother of all his offspring, now beside the cross with her: the indomitable John, the constant Magdalene, and a small gathering of less well known but faithful supporters.

Sacred tradition teaches us that her birth of Jesus was without physical pain, but not this birth on Calvary; not this birth of the often treacherous brothers and sisters of her only Son. No sooner had she become a mother to them than she saw Jesus mocked in His thirst by the bitterness of vinegar, and then abused in his death by an unnecessary and vicious wound to His heart; Jesus, become a rag doll victim of the wild violence of men, the unthinking and unwitting objects of his prayers for their forgiveness. They know not what they do.

And through it all, there remains the joyous conviction of the fulfilment of the Father’s forming action: the Father’s forming action on her Son and on her, associated now with His labour of love that appears all but wasted and lost, as the rain lashes mercilessly down on her.

Must all Thy harvest fields be dunged with rotten death?

Where is your joy now, Mary? It is hidden in the depths of a heart that is held by His grace, unbroken by the worst the powers of evil throw at her and that the Father allows to strike her full on. The fiat in sorrow can only come from a deeper and more lasting fiat in joy. For God is love; and joy, mercy and peace are the essence of love.

But this is not today’s gospel, you say? It is yesterday’s, isn’t it? No, dear reader, don’t think like the progressives who declare today a step forward on yesterday and would rather we forgot the past. Time is circular, every part of it touching the same eternal truth, like a wheel around a hub or a circumference to its periphery. 

And so, Mary’s motherhood of the Church belongs to today and tomorrow. Her example and her care are there always. We only need look for it.    

 

 

Remaining in His love

 With today's gospel (15: 9-17), we enter a little more deeply into the mystery of the love that God shares with us through His Son Jesus Christ. These words of Jesus at the Last Supper are echoed somehow in the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace. 

What is our Lord's love for us like then? How does He love us? He Himself gives the answer: 

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.

Yet this is utterly breath taking. The love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father breathes forth a third person - the Holy Spirit. In these days before Pentecost, we can only wonder at what this mystery of their mutual love means, and how it comes to us as a gift of them both. Now, to wonder is to contemplate, and to contemplate is at the heart of the Colwelian vocation. 

When we hear the Colwelian call to contemplation, we are listening to the music of this love. In our naivety, perhaps we sometimes think of it in terms of prayers and devotions; the quantifiable panoply of religiosity, as dignified and as honourable as they are. But, contemplation is rather what fills the sails of our prayers and devotions with a divine wind. As the Father has loved the Son...just think of it. As the Father has loved the Son! We will never finish contemplating that mystery, and so, we will never finish contemplating the mystery of His love for us. 

My song is love unknown,

My Saviour's love to me,

Love to the loveless shown

That thy might lovely be.

To contemplate means to gaze attentively - literally as in a temple - where we behold the mysteries of our faith. Our temples are our churches of course, but they are also our own souls in which the Blessed Trinity comes to dwell.

And there He shares His joy with us so that our joy may be complete. But why should it not be complete after this? If He has loved us like the Father has loved Him, it only remains for us to become fully awake, fully alive, to the implications of that love. 

And to return it to Him with a strength only He can lend to us. 

Let us remain in this love and do everything it requires of us. Our lives can have no other meaning than this.

His joy!

We have been poorly and normal service has been interrupted. Nevertheless, I did not want to let today's gospel go by without making some remarks. Today's gospel (John 15: 9-11) is an essential COLW gospel. 

It begins in the love of the Father for the Son - As the Father has loved me - which is the origin of everything. It begins in the communion which, as this blog observed a few posts ago, is the origin of all forms of communion in this life or the next. Religion begins not in our action but in this outpouring of God's very self in love which needs must share its goodness with the world. As St Francis Xavier put it, " O Deus ego amo te, Ne prior tu amasti me ("My God, I love you, because you first loved me.")

Jesus then links that generative love to submission to the Father and the keeping of the commandments. People tend to speak of the commandments as moral injunctions, but only the second part of the Decalogue concerns the moral life. The first part concerns everything we owe to God before we have set foot outside our door or even acknowledged our life in society. Ultimately, Jesus' injunction here recalls His answer to the question about the greatest commandment: you shall the love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength (Mark 12:30). The first act of religion is surrender and submission in the same way that Jesus' role of saviour is initiated in His self emptying. Just as He put aside His rightful dignity in order to bring us back to the love of the Father, so we must put aside our wrongful pride in order for that love of the Father to take us back home: If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and remain in His love. To remain in His love is already to be home with God, for home is the stable place where things do not change, least of all the love of the Father for the Son and the love of the Holy Spirit which they breathe forth.

And finally we come to the Colwelian heart of this gospel:

I have told you this so that my own joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.

We find our own joys fleeting and subject to change. They ebb and flow with our moods and often with the events of the day .We often sail three sheets to the wind and so are blown off course with every gale. 

But if we only realised this gift of Jesus' joy - that my own joy may be in you -  the stable joy of His eternal peace, the joy He radiates when He forgives the sinner, His joy in doing the will of the Father. His joy is present even in the midst of His sorrows and the midst of our sorrows; it is rooted in the endless torrent of love that flows from the communion of the Blessed Trinity in whom all loss can be understood and assuaged. As Francis Thompson's Hound of Heaven put it: 

All which I took from thee I did but take

Not for thy harms,

But just that thou might'st seek it in my arms.

All which thy child's mistake

Fancies as lost I have stored for thee at home

Rise clasp my hand and come! 

And now He teaches his disciples the love of the Father so that my own joy may be in you and your joy may be complete. We must pray that He open our hearts to receive this extraordinary gift. Of course we can no more contain that joy than a hole in the sand can capture all the sea. But if we were at least filled with it to the measure of our fulness, would it not radiate out to others and help reflect His light into their hearts too? 

Jesus, make us worthy vessels of your joy to share your love in the joyless darkness of our world.