5th Sunday of Easter 2026
Acts 6: 1-7; 1 Peter 2: 4-9; John 14: 1-12
Philip said “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us” (or “we shall be satisfied”). No, it isn’t, Philip, and we shall never be satisfied because the desires of the human heart are insatiable this side of eternity. Whatever we have, we shall always want more. St. Augustine famously wrote “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless till they rest in you”. That is true, but it is unlikely (impossible?) that this rest will be found completely in this life. Our hearts will not rest until we have seen Christ face to face, and that won’t happen this side of the grave.
Will it happen after death? Yes, we have Jesus’ word for it. “If I go and prepare a place for you, I shall return to take you to myself.” This is the passage chosen most often by mourners when preparing the funeral of a loved one. This choice is an expression of our restlessness, of that desire for the rest in God which Our Lord promises, and of our faith in that promise.
Does that mean that we are always going to be dissatisfied, unhappy, in this life? Not at all. To be unsatisfied, and to be dissatisfied, are not necessarily the same thing. To be dissatisfied is to be negative, a grumbler, a misery guts, a serial complainer. You may have read “The Chronicles of Narnia” by CS Lewis. If so, you will have met the dwarves, who are chronic grumblers.
Everything is wrong for them: they can see nothing good in anything or anybody. This attitude becomes so strong that, eventually, they become incapable of recognising goodness. They are sitting in the sun. amid the most glorious scenery, sharing a banquet of the finest food and drink, yet they are convinced that they are cooped up in a dank and dirty dungeon, and being fed straw. They are so conditioned to grumbling that they have created hell for themselves; they have become so determined to be miserable, that they can no longer do anything else.
Do you know any perpetual grumblers? Do you recognise anything of the sort in yourself? I can certainly see it at times in me. It is an easy habit to get into, but it is a destructive habit, and we must break it if we are truly to encounter God, because negativity is incompatible with God.
This doesn’t mean that we should settle for injustice, with unfair conditions for ourselves or others. Rather than sit around grumbling, though, we should take steps to improve matters. Allegedly, it was a nineteenth century English Methodist minister named William Watkinson who first used the expression “Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness”—in other words, don’t grumble: do something.
What about being “unsatisfied” though? That is the human condition, implanted in our nature by God. Consciously or not, we have an instinct telling us that we were created for more than this life can offer. We were created for life with God, and until we reach that we cannot and should not be satisfied.
We should be happy; we should be filled with joy. Recall Jesus’ words in last week’s Gospel: “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full”. We should recognise, here and now, the gifts which God has given us, and we should enjoy them. We were not created to be miserable, even if this world is, at times, a vale of tears, as we proclaim in the Salve Regina (Hail Holy Queen), and we should rejoice even more in the promise of final satisfaction, of eternal joy, and we should strive towards it.
“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless till they rest in you. Let that restlessness drive us on to seek actively to build the Kingdom of God, let it move us to oppose injustice, let it enable us to enjoy God’s gifts here and now, and let it preserve us from negativity and from grumbling.
(And let it encourage Sir Mick Jagger not to give up hope.)
