Easter Week 5 Monday

Readings: Acts 14:5-18; Psalm 115; John 14:21-26

Paul and Barnabas are on a roller coaster as they travel around Asia Minor preaching the gospel. In one moment they are in danger of being stoned and they make themselves scarce. In the next moment they are in danger of being deified as people prepare to sacrifice animals to them. The interruption of the holy generates fear and awe, leading human beings to seek either to expel the cause of such feelings or to include it somehow within their established way of thinking and living.

Faith (which Paul sees in the crippled man) is a door, an opening, a vision on to another landscape, but one which remains largely unclear and mysterious. ('Now I see in a glass, darkly.') Some of faith's manifestations encourage us to include it, to welcome and embrace it: the healing of a crippled man, for example. In other moments we will want to turn from this call to believe and drive it away: when it shows us up as crippled men and women, for example, and directs us to restructure our world and to revise radically our ways of thinking and living.

All of this happens with the preaching of the gospel: the crippled jump up and walk while the settled moral and doctrinal convictions of Jews and Gentiles are relativised and they are asked to open up to a new reality. They are instructed to get up, shake off a paralysis they may or may not have been aware of, and walk in a new way.

Jesus speaks of this new reality, this new way of walking, in today's gospel reading. First and last it is love, a love of his word, a love reciprocated because it originates not in the believer but in the one who speaks that word ('this is the love I mean, not our love for God but God's love for us'). The one who speaks that word to us is Jesus who teaches us, however, that the word he speaks originates not in himself but in the Father who sent him. Together they will love the ones who keep their word, they will come and make their home with them.

Now Jesus reveals more, teaching us that this word will be carried forward by another advocate, another who is to be sent by the Father, and by Jesus returned to the Father. This is the Holy Spirit, the power of love abiding in those who believe to ensure that they are fully taught, that they remember the fulness of the Lord's word.

This is the irruption of the holy promised by the preaching of the gospel. 'Irruption' seems too violent a word for it, this coming of Father, Word and Spirit to dwell in us, to make their home in us, to abide (what a beautiful word that is!), to consolidate in us the word breathing love which God is. The Christian tradition will speak of it as the indwelling of the Persons of the Blessed Trinity or even as the human being's participation in the divine nature. (So the Lycaonians who wanted to worship Paul and Barnabas were not entirely mistaken even if their understanding was still quite seriously distorted!)

Will we stone those who bring this message of the indwelling of God in human hearts? Will we be so taken by it that we will treat its bearers as gurus, perhaps even as themselves gods? We might think ourselves beyond both of these primitive reactions. More likely then, in us, would be to regard it as no big deal, as already within our comprehension, to treat it with an indifference born of familiarity.

We must trust that the word of the Father, spoken by Jesus, and echoed across the centuries by the Holy Spirit in the Church, will find ways to remind us of its presence, of its promise, of its call. It is a delicate process for it is a prompting of us and in us by God who is infinitely holy. How will we receive such an intimate and profound approach? At times we may want to spit it out and turn our backs. At times we may want to use it for any number of purposes of our own.

As we move towards Pentecost let us pray that we can remain open to the coming of the Spirit, keen to hear the word in its fulness, ready to enter more deeply into its depth of meaning, disposed to the radical changes the word promises. Be not afraid, says the Lord, knocking on our door, come with honourable intentions, that keeping his word we might remain in his love, that he with his Father and the Holy Spirit might dwell with us, and that we might have life, a fulness of life as yet unimagined.

Fear alerts us to what might be lost. Love teaches us that what might be lost is nothing compared with the gifts in store for us.