This Sunday is Pentecost, the birthday of the Church! We celebrate that Jesus has not only ascended into heaven but has sent us his Advocate, the gift of the Holy Spirit alive and aflame among us. In one of my favorite works of spiritual fiction, Women of the Passion by Joan D. Lynch, when the Holy Spirit appears among those celebrating the Jewish feast of Pentecost as tongues of fire, great rushing winds, and people speaking in tongues, Mary Magdalene prays: “Thank you, Lord. Thank you for this astonishing gift. Make me worthy of it.”
Perhaps we never get any closer to someone else than when we know about their prayer life. As we eavesdrop on the prayer of Jesus in today’s Gospel, we are indeed entering holy ground.
On the night before his passion, Jesus gathered with his disciples in the upper room, and prayed to His Father in a profound and very beautiful way. As the evangelist recorded those precious moments between Jesus and the Father, we can enter into the essential truth of his heart and understand our participation in the divine plan of God. Jesus does not see his death as a catastrophic loss for his disciples but rather as a departure to the Father and a new way of being with those who are still in the world. "Father, the hour has come, glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you" with these beautiful words, Jesus who will draw every woman and man to himself, tells us that we come to the Son to receive the life of the Father and the Son is glorified by attracting us to him.
Jesus says in John's Gospel, “I will not leave you orphans.” (14:18). A few years ago, I met an orphan: Esther. She was now 90 years old, yet was orphaned as a child, and spent ten difficult years in an orphanage in central Pennsylvania. Now, decades later, Esther was able to transcend feelings of loneliness, and isolation. She began to experience the reality that as a Christian, she is never abandoned, never truly alone. Even in an isolated room of a nursing home with no family to visit, Esther was able to experience – personally and deeply – the reality that in Christ Jesus, none of us are orphans, none are abandoned.
In John’s gospel, we hear Jesus calmly and patiently responding to the disciples’ fears. Just before this story begins, He told them that he is leaving, and they won’t see him for a while. Jesus tells his friends, “Do not let your hearts be troubled...I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be.” We respond in the same way to our child or our spouse when they share their worries with us: we offer a touch or a word that reassures. “It’s okay; I’m here; I’ll be back soon.” And like the disciples, our family members sometimes need us to say it again another way: “Trust me. You know me – I’m here for you.” To quote Teresa of Avila, we are Christ to them when “Christ has no body now on earth” but ours, and like Jesus did for his friends, we will repeat the words as many times as the person in distress needs to hear them, and listen as long as they need to talk.
This coming week, the St. Joseph’s flock welcomes all to come and hear the voice of Father Rosica as he joins us for a three-night reflection on Experiencing Resurrection in our lives. He will break open and unpack the four Gospel accounts of our Risen Lord. Recently he wrote: “One doesn’t sit at a computer and tap out ‘Jesus is Risen.’ It has to be performed and enacted. If the Resurrection were meant to be a historically verifiable occurrence, God wouldn't have performed it in the dark without eyewitnesses. Resurrection was an event transacted between God the Father and God the Son by the power of God the Holy Spirit. Not a single Gospel tells us how it happened. We don’t know what he looked like when he was no longer dead, whether he burst the tomb in glory or came out like Lazarus, slowly unwrapping his shroud and squinting with wonder against the dawn of Easter morning in a garden in Jerusalem.”