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Sixth Sunday of Easter John 15/9-17 |
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| Background: We continue this Sunday to hear Jesus’s last supper "discourse" to his apostles. It is in fact a long theological and mystical reflection on the meaning of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection written several decades after the events. It does not seem, however, unlikely that some of the words in the discourse were part of a much older tradition with which the author of the gospel was working. Hence Jesus probably did say "I do not call you servants, I call you friends." Certainly those words were a summary of how he had lived with his followers and how he cared for them. We must be especially wary to thinking that the love Jesus felt for his followers was something bland and "spiritual." Jesus loved them as any human loves very close friends. So he loves us because the words in St. John’s Gospel were intended for all those who came after the Gospel was written. |
read the padre |
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Story: This the year for films about class reunions. They are usually ten year high school reunions and are pretty horrible. Yet, once upon a time, there was a fiftieth reunion of a high school class. Everyone was in their late sixties, yet they had no trouble remembering one another. The reunion was a grace for all because everyone felt young again and felt a promise that perhaps they could be young again permanently. Two men who had been inseparable through grammar school and high school and who had a fight on graduation day met each other for the first time in fifty years. They grinned, shook hands, and then, with the new emotional freedom that some men have learned from their wives, they hugged one another. They spent the rest of the day laughing together about the good times they had enjoyed when they were young, so much fun, so much laughter, so many good times, so much happiness. They talked about all the years since then, the excitement and terror of the war, the surprise of prosperity after the war, happiness despite strain in their marriages, problems and triumphs with their children and grand children. Somehow it seemed that they eliminated the separation of a half century, that they had been close all those fifty years since their graduation. What was the fight about the wife of one of them asked as she and her husband were going home. Neither of us could remember her husband replied. Turns out we’ve been friends all along without knowing it. We couldn’t get away from our friendship no matter how hard we tried. Such is the nature of the friendship Jesus promised us in his last supper discourse. |
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