HOMILY for Thu 7 of Easter
Acts 22:30. 23:6-11; Ps 15; John 17:20-26
One of the characteristics of friendship is that friends share important aspects of their life with one another and reveal things about themselves to one another. So, Jesus has said that he calls us his friends because he makes known to us all that he has heard from his Father (Jn 15:15). And that is what he is doing in today’s Gospel, showing us friendship by revealing to us the beautiful intimacy of the life of the Holy Trinity, and leading us to see what friendship with God entails.
The verses I want to concentrate on are these, the final words in Jesus’ long Last Supper discourse and prayer. He says: “I made known to them your name, and I will make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them” (Jn 17:26). Here, Jesus is speaking of the person of the Holy Spirit, who is Love itself, the perfect love of the Father and the Son. It is the Holy Spirit who is the mutual bond of love between the Father and the Son, so that, as St Thomas says: “The Father and the Son love each other through the Holy Spirit”. Thus, the Holy Trinity is a communion of love; “God is love”, as St John says (1 Jn 4:8).
So, Jesus says that the Holy Spirit, the love with which the Father loves the Son, comes to dwell in us. And this happens when Jesus has made known the Father’s name to us. For this is what the Son has come to do: to reveal to us, his friends, that God is Abba, Father, and to teach us how to live as God’s sons and daughters. Through Christ, then, and through faith in his Word, we are able to have the same relationship of divine Sonship that he has with the Father.
This faith, this knowledge of the Truth, comes from Christ for he is Truth. And faith precedes love because we cannot love who we do not know – which is why it is important to read the Scriptures, to engage in theology and learn about God and the Faith. Because as we come to know the Father; as we profess the Truth that Christ and his Church teaches us; and we become converted to the mind of Christ, so that we think and see as he does; then the Spirit comes to us too. The Spirit comes as Love itself to hold us in a mutual bond of love with the Father, and to empower us to love the Father as the Son does, that is, through him. Hence, St Paul says: “Because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Gal 4:6).
The result of this coming of the Son and the Holy Spirit to dwell in us is that we know and love the Father, and so, we are united with the one God, dwelling in the communion of love that is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And this is what we mean by the life of grace, which is given in Baptism, and for you and me to be in a state of grace, which is only lost through mortal sin. But Confession restores this grace to us if we’ve lost it, so that we have communion and friendship with the Holy Trinity once more.
This life of grace is, quite literally, heaven on earth, and eternity right now; it is our humanity being sanctified and made divine so that God doesn’t just call us his friends. He calls you “my beloved son”.
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