Sunday, May 12, 2024
6th Sunday of Easter – Year B

1st reading: Acts 1,15-17.20a.20c-26
Psaume : 102 (103),1-2,11-12,19-20ab
2rd reading: 1 John 4,11-16
Gospel: John 17,11b-19

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This Sunday, which is located between Ascension and Pentecost, is marked - like all of these days which separate these two events - by the expectation of the Holy Spirit, prayer to the Holy Spirit, the desire to be renewed in the Spirit. Today's readings highlight two fundamental aspects, one could say, of what the Spirit comes to achieve in us: truth and charity. We have heard in the gospel how the Lord describes our situation. We are not World in the sense in which we were born of God. Through baptism we were adopted as beloved children of the Father, we became brothers of Christ. And in the power of the Holy Spirit, we live a new life... In Teresian terms, in this exile, we live the grace of the Fatherland of Heaven. 

Our reference is not the way the world lives: our reference is the way God lives. And this is revealed to us in Jesus, who is true God and true man. The humanity of Jesus is very important to contemplate so that we understand that it is possible for a man to love as God loves. And let us not deny ourselves by saying that Jesus is very special, he who is without sin; let us not reject ourselves because he gives us share in his Spirit so that we ourselves, gradually, become conquerors of sin, we who are already conquerors of death. This is the teaching of Paul in chapter 6 of the Letter to the Romans or that which he gives at the beginning of chapter 3 of the Letter to the Colossians, when he tells us that we have already died and that we have been resurrected with Christ, even if it is not yet visible.

Our Christian life can only truly unfold through faith. Our concrete and sensitive experience of the sacraments is that we are the same afterward as before. There can sometimes be some psychological implications, particularly when one is going to receive the sacrament of penance and reconciliation, but this sensitivity does not tell the heart of what is at stake in the sacraments. We can only experience the sacraments by faith. I do not direction not a child of God, I think ! I do not direction not Jesus when I come to receive communion, I think ! I do not direction not the Holy Spirit when I receive the sacrament of confirmation, I think ! I do not direction not grow wings to love my spouse in an extraordinary way when I get married... I think day after day may the Lord give me what I need to persevere in the love of my spouse. And I could still review the other sacraments. Our Christian life is lived by faith and this faith makes us welcome the gift of the Holy Spirit. He makes us hear, if we meditate on the Holy Scriptures, if we listen to them when they are proclaimed, what God wants us to hear. And what God reveals to us is true: “Sanctify them in the truth, your word is truth. » The Holy Spirit comes to enlighten our intelligence so that we can love the truth, know the truth, so that we can listen to what God reveals to us through his word or through the world that he has created, and through all true word that we hear. Nothing is true that does not come from God... But every lie comes from the devil whom Jesus calls the liar and the father of lies (Jn 8,44:XNUMX). 

Loving the truth wherever it is, in whatever domain it may be, whether in the philosophical domain, in the scientific domain, in the theological domain, in the political domain, whether in our relationships: telling the truth, to do the truth, to be true, that is the work of the Spirit! And this is not an easy task because it requires a lot of humility, especially when telling the truth implies that we recognize that we have done wrong, that we have spoken wrong, that we have forgotten or I don't know what else.

On the last day of her life, September 30, 1897, Thérèse exclaimed:

Yes, it seems to me that I have never sought anything but the truth; Yes, I understood the humility of the heart… It seems to me that I am humble. (Yellow notebook September 30, 1897)

It would be beautiful if each of us, on our deathbed, could speak like this. 

The second thing that the Holy Spirit does is to support our will, our capacity to act, our capacity to do. We have an intelligence to know the truth, we have a will to be able to act in accordance with the truth ourselves. And it is through this will that we can love. It is the second reading, taken from chapter 4 of the first Letter of Saint John, which takes us on this path of love: “Since God has loved us so much, we also must love one another.” I have already quoted it here, but I will quote it again; in a letter that Thérèse wrote to Céline on August 19, 1894, shortly before Céline entered Carmel, she said:

The only crime that was reproached to Jesus by Herod was to be mad and I think like him!... yes it was madness to seek the poor little hearts of mortals to make their thrones, He the King of Glory who is sitting on the cherubim... He whose presence cannot fill the Heavens... Our Beloved was crazy to come to earth to seek sinners to make them his friends, his intimates, his fellow men, He who was perfectly happy with both adorable people of the Trinity!… We will never be able to do for Him the follies that He did for us and our actions will not deserve this name, because they are only very reasonable acts and well below what our love would like to accomplish.

One of those Teresian impulses that we know! But it says nothing other than what Saint John says: “God loved us so much, we too must love one another.” And this love that Jesus commands us — Love one another as I have loved you — this love is necessary for the world to know God. Let's listen again: “God, no one has ever seen him. But if we love one another, God abides in us, and in us his love reaches perfection.”

Fraternal charity, lived in imitation of Jesus, bears witness to the world of the Holy Trinity. You probably know Mother Teresa's response to a journalist who asked her what needed to change in the Church, and she replied: "You and me - you and me!" » 

The only power I have in the Church to change the Church, to make it more beautiful, more holy, is me, it is my life, it is my heart. And it is about each of us understanding that we all have the possibility of beautifying the Church. We all have the opportunity to bear witness to Christ through the conversion of our own lives. 

No one saw what Thérèse was experiencing at Carmel, apart from the twenty other nuns who were there. And yet what testimony, and yet what radiance! But this means that we must live openly before the Lord, that we must live under the gaze of God, so that we can constantly welcome this grace of the Holy Spirit who wants to deploy charity in us. of God. 

So, in this week which separates us from the feast of Pentecost, let us pray to the Holy Spirit; not only let us pray to the Holy Spirit to come and renew us, but let us be attentive in the concrete aspects of our existence to bear witness to the truth, to renounce all lies and sometimes renounce lying to ourselves, to accept every word of truth , even if it judges us. Let us be attentive to living a concrete fraternal charity, especially with those around us whom we have difficulty loving. And if you want to understand this last point better, you will read in manuscript C from folio 12: Thérèse will teach you about what this concrete charity is. 

Yes, brothers and sisters in our poverty, our smallness, our helplessness, we in fact have a great power: it is that of believing with all our soul that what God reveals to us is true. And then, taking him at his word, to try to live what he tells us, poorly, but with perseverance.

Amen