A Message for the 6th Sunday of the Easter Season:
Today we celebrate both Mother’s Day and, from the looks of the bleary-eyed teenagers and their relieved parents recovering from last night’s Prom, the impending end of the school year and of course, graduation. I, for one, can’t start thinking of graduation without calling to mind the ubiquitous graduation speeches given at every school, reminding the newly released that they’re about to set out on their own (in one capacity or another) and sending them off with a little parting advice. The graduates, in turn, listen to their speeches and feel all of their big ‘feels’: excitement, boredom, wonderment and anxiety as to how well they’re going to do in the real world, and while they’re at it, wondering how well the person sitting next to them is going to do. And further wondering, of course, if there’s the graduation gift at the end of all this. Preferably some wheels.
I bring all that up because in many ways, the speech Jesus gives his disciples in the 14th chapter of John is a graduation speech and one in which Jesus shares some parting wisdom and advice while the disciples wonder how long they’re going to last in the real world and if there is gift at the end of all this. (Probably not wheels.) So I invite you into that upper room on that last night together where we too can imagine ourselves as both disciples and graduates, and we can take in the wisdom, feel all the big emotions, and listen to what Jesus is trying to impart on that last night together.
In John’s telling, this is a long night, and one in which Jesus starts his speech with a surprise: “I am not going to be with you any longer.” This is news to the disciples who did not know this was their graduation night. They are, I’m sure, a little shocked, and you can imagine the side conversations starting up around the room. “Did you know he was leaving?” “I didn’t know.” “If Peter knew and didn’t tell us, I’m going to have his hide.”
Then the doubts begin creep in: “Why?” “Where are you going?” “What are we going to do?” “Jesus, I am here because of you. I left my career as a tax collector, as a fisherman, to follow you. That’s what I do. That’s who I am. And if you’re not here, what do I do?” “You say you’re going away? Fine—we’ll just go with you. Wait, we can’t go with you!!??”
And there had to be some snarkiness too, as the disciples looked around the table at each other. “Those Zebedee brothers down there, James and John—they’re not going to make it. Their father barely handled them as fishermen, and they can’t go back to that.” “Stephen? That dude just can’t stop running his mouth, and that’s just not going to end well in this political climate.” (It didn’t)
Into that quintessential graduation moment, Jesus shares some wisdom, albeit a little cryptically: he says, “Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me, and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.” (One can be forgiven for feeling that reading the Gospel of John is a little like walking around in a convoluted circle and ending up right back where one started.)
Thankfully, in our reading from Acts this morning, St. Paul was trying to explain the same spiritual truth to a group of Athenians, and we can use his way of explaining it to understand what Jesus is saying to his disciples. In speaking about God to the Greeks in a way he thought would make sense to them, Paul crafts one of the most famous lines we have about God: “In [God] we live and move and have our being.” In other words, God is in everything and with everything, and we are a part of that. It’s as if Paul—and Jesus too—is saying that all of creation is like the connective tissue of the Divine. It is inescapable. It is everywhere. And it is love.
Jesus hints at this when he talks about the Father and himself and us all being connected in this symbiotic relationship of love. You can’t escape it. It swirls around us, and we are in the midst of that love, that connection with the divine.
Which, coming in the form of advice, is interesting to think about. Jesus is not saying, “Seek God.” You can’t really seek something that is already everywhere. You can’t “find” God. All we can do is remember that we are already part of it and improve the degree to which we are aware of our connection to God in all things.
And once we can do that—once we can increase our awareness—then we can increase our gratitude for being connected to the God, the love, of all things.
And finally, if we can increase our awareness and increase our gratitude, then that begins to guide our lives. We can begin to live more fully into those truths.
That’s the message Jesus is trying to share. That’s the graduation wisdom he imparts as the disciples are headed out the door. He’s saying: You can’t escape God. We are an inextricable part of it all. All you can do is increase your awareness of it and then live into that awareness.
And if you take that a step further, you realize something important: you can’t earn your way into love. You can’t earn your way into heaven: the love is already present. All you can do is recognize it and respond to it. That response is the natural result of recognizing our connection to all things divine and being grateful for it.
So that’s the wisdom Jesus imparts to his disciples. And you can imagine them saying, “Okay, maybe we can do that.” But like any good graduates, they eventually get to the end of the speech and think, “Great. But what’s the gift?” And Jesus says, “I do have a gift for you. I’m going to ask the Father to give you a gift. I’m going to give you the paraclete.”
Huh?… Exactly.
They all looked at each other and said, “The what? Have you heard of the paraclete? I skipped that class.”
And believe me, they were not the last students of Christ to wonder about that word. John wrote it in Greek: parakletos. Later, Jerome—the great Christian scholar who translated the Bible into Latin—translated all the Greek into Latin until he got to that word. He basically shrugged and said, “I guess we’ll call it paracletus,” and moved on. For centuries, Christians have read that word and thought, “Still not entirely sure what that means.” Over time, translators have tried different words for it. In the New Revised Standard Version we heard today, it’s translated as “advocate.” It has also been translated as “friend,” “counselor,” and “helper.”
All of those translations are trying to point toward this aspect of the Divine that is for you, uniquely on your side, loving you and looking after you. So while we can also say that God is the one “in whom we live and move and have our being,” there is also this deeply personal dimension of God that loves you specifically. We often speak of this as the Holy Spirit. Jesus himself calls it “the Spirit of Truth.” That is the gift he gives.
And truth is a powerful gift.
There’s an old saying that truth without compassion and kindness is just cruelty, and compassion and kindness without truth is just manipulation. There’s wisdom in that. At the 8 o’clock service, John McClelland reminded us of another old saying: “The truth is dangerous. Use sparingly.” And that points to how difficult truth can be in our lives—the truth about our political system, our country, the state of the world, ourselves, and one another.
How hard is it to tell the truth? It’s one thing to tell your spouse they have a piece of lettuce in their teeth, but would you do that for somebody you didn’t know very well? When do we decide, “I’m just going to let that truth go. I’m not going to face that one. I’m not going to say that out loud”? Truth is hard. It is raw. It requires compassion and kindness. But it is also necessary.
The reason Jesus gave truth as his graduation gift to the disciples was because with truth they could finally see what their work in the world was. They could not simply rest on the comfort of being connected to the God of all things. They also had to see the ways the world was broken, their community was broken, and they themselves were broken. Then, with compassion and kindness, they could move forward into the work of helping build the kingdom of God. Knowing the wisdom Jesus imparted—that they were connected to all things divine—and seeing the truth clearly, they knew what to do.
That is the graduation message.
So we imagine ourselves in that room. Jesus says goodbye. Soon after this meal he will be arrested, and they will never see him again alive in the same way. And he sends them out remembering three things: while we cannot earn our way into heaven, we can always increase our awareness of God and God’s work around this world; we can always increase our thankfulness for being part of God’s world; and we can always respond to that gratitude and awareness by living into the truth God shows us.
Happy graduation. Go forth into the world rejoicing in the power of the paraclete. Amen.
Along The Way... 
Leave a comment