6th Sunday of Easter 2025
Acts 15: 1-2, 22-29; Apocalypse 21:10-14, 22-23; John 14:23-29
Three different statements by Our Lord in today’s Gospel strike me very powerfully. Firstly, “If anyone loves me, they will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we shall come to them and make our home with them.” Secondly, “The Helper (Advocate, Encourager, Paraclete) whom the Father will send in my name will teach you everything”, and thirdly, “Let not your hearts be troubled, nor let them be afraid.”
On the principle that the last shall be first, I shall look at the first of them and ask “Is your heart troubled…and if not now, is it ever troubled?”
I suspect that we should be very strange people if our hearts were never troubled: in fact, we should be insensitive people. We inevitably feel our own troubles and, please God, the troubles of others; and some of us are prone to depression, a painful yet potentially fruitful illness. The questions are: what troubles us? And how do we deal with those troubles?
There is a story about a barmaid who went down into a cellar to change a barrel. After half an hour, she hadn’t reappeared, so the landlord went down to look for her. He found her sitting on the floor, her head in her hands, weeping, the tap of the barrel open, and the beer escaping in torrents.
“I was thinking” she moaned. “What if I should get married one day, and have a daughter, and she should come to work here, and come down into the cellar, and someone should have spilt beer on the floor, and she should slip in it, and fall and bang her head, and die?”
Are some of your troubles and mine like that: worries about things which may never happen, and over which we have no control? When I am troubled, anxious, angry about anything, I tell myself to ask myself—though I don’t always obey myself—“Can I do anything about this?” The answer is always “Yes”, because I can always pray: I can put the matter in God’s hands.
Then, is there anything else that I can do? Perhaps I can actively intervene, and deal with whatever the problem is. If it is a wider issue, perhaps I can email someone, or sign a petition, or make a financial contribution. If there is nothing in which I can actively participate, then once again I can pray. Ultimately, I can place whatever it is in God’s hands, and ask Him to deal with it: He is far better at it than I am, and He has had more practice. Then, as far as possible, I should stop worrying, and I should lift up my heart. Our hearts should be engaged, but our trust should be in God, and our troubles, as far as we are able, handed over to Him.
Now, let’s move on to that first statement: “If anyone loves me, they will keep my word”. Do you, do I, try to keep God’s word, to direct our life by it? If we do, “My Father will love them, and we shall come to them, and make our home with them”. Do you believe that God—Father, Son, and Spirit—lives with and in you? Is your heart open in welcome to God? Jesus is not a teacher, whose example we follow: He is God, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, and He, the Father, and the Spirit, live in us and are at home in us. What greater gift, what greater source of encouragement and consolation, can there be than that?
If even that is not enough for us, “The Advocate, whom the Father will send in my name”—notice the Trinity working together—“will teach you everything”. A fortnight from today, we shall celebrate the Feast of Pentecost, recalling the outpouring of the Spirit upon the infant Church, and we shall be reminded also of the gentle breathing of that same Spirit which occurred on Easter Sunday evening. As with our weekly or daily celebration of Mass, that is not merely the remembering of a past event, but the making present of that event, here, and now, and forever.
Are you and I prepared, over the next fortnight, to open ourselves to a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit? Are we open to recognising the presence of God, dwelling in us? If you and I are willing to answer “Yes” to those questions, then we can confidently hand over to God whatever may trouble our hearts.
