“…the Father will give you another advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot accept because it neither sees nor knows that Spirit of truth.” John 14: 15-21
The Sixth Sunday of Easter coincides with Mother’s Day (Second Sunday in May). The gospel-reading from John proclaimed in our Sunday liturgy has as its focus Jesus’ promise to his disciples to send them the Holy Spirit to be their guide, inspiration, protector and advocate. Throughout history, mothers have reflected those very qualities in guiding and caring for their children. The idea of a day to celebrate the world’s mothers was conceived by a woman from West Virginia in the mid 1890s by the name of Ann Jarvis-Reeves. She and her husband Granville were the parents of 13 children, 9 of whom died in early childhood. The grief those parents experienced led them to become social activists advocating for improved public sanitation and adequate medical treatment to counter childhood diseases. Ann acted as a Sunday School teacher in their local Methodist Episcopal Church and established Mother’s Day Work Clubs to support the mothers of young children. It was her inspiration that led her eleventh child Anna to advocate for the establishment of a day to commemorate the work, sacrifice, dedication and care of ordinary mothers. As a consequence of her efforts, President Woodrow Wilson signed a resolution of Congress in 1914 that established the Second Sunday of May as National Mother’s Day in the United States. However, in 1943 Anna Maria Jarvis-Reeves initiated a campaign to have Mother’s Day rescinded as a national commemoration because, in her view, it had become over-commercialised.
The gospel-reading for this Sixth Sunday of Easter gives us 7 verses from Jesus’ discourse to his disciples at the Last Supper in which we hear him urging those disciples to trust him totally. In fact, the way in which John has quoted Jesus seems to suggest that Jesus was doing a deal with his disciples: “Look, if you love me, you will prove that by keeping my commandments. In response, I will ask God, my Father, to send you another Advocate!” It was rather like what a mother might say to her very young son: “If you’re good this morning, we’ll go to the park this afternoon.” That was equivalent to Jesus saying to his disciples: “If you do the right thing, if you behave, I’ll ask God to give you all the help you need.” That way of interpreting Jesus’ words suggests that we can earn God’s approval by being on our best behaviour. That’s theological and spiritual nonsense. Moreover, its meaninglessness is fully revealed almost immediately when Jesus proceeds to refer to a Spirit of truth concerning whom the world hasn’t got the slightest clue. That world follows the argument that all our successes have to be earned by fully investing our efforts and energy in pursuing them. That’s the route to investment, commercial and career success. That’s the system the world understands and follows. Jesus’ reference to “a Spirit of Truth which the world cannot understand” must be something totally different. Jesus is referring to what can happen to us when we are totally captivated by the realisation that God actually does love us more dearly than we can even imagine.
John elaborated on this in his First Letter in which he asserted: “God is love, and God’s love for us was revealed when God sent into the world God’s only Son so that we could have life through him; this is the life I mean: not our love for God, but God’s love for us when he sent his Son to be the sacrifice that takes our sins away. My dear people, since God has loved us so much, we should love one another. No one has ever seen God; but as long as we love one another, God will live in us and God’s love will be complete in us. We can know that we are living in God and God is living in us because God lets us share God’s Spirit…If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in her/him and she/he in God….God is love and anyone who lives in love lives in God, and God lives in her/him.” (1 John 4: 8-16)
It is worth our noting that, in the Old/First Testament, there are nearly four hundred references to the breath or spirit of God. The earliest of these is to be found in the Book of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was a formless void. There was darkness over the deep, and God’s spirit hovered over the water.” (Genesis 1:1) The second is in the very next chapter: “God fashioned man of dust from the soil. Then God breathed into his nostrils a breath of life, and thus man became a living being.” (Genesis 2: 7) While there are various Hebrew expressions used for the breath or spirit of God, the most common one is Ruah Elohim. Grammatically, it is feminine gender, suggesting the notion of tenderness.
In encouraging his disciples at the Last Supper, there was little doubt that Jesus was well aware of their frailty and the vulnerability they would experience once he was no longer near them. Hence, he stressed that he would send them another Advocate, his Spirit, a guide to continue the guidance he had been giving them; one whom he described as “the Spirit of truth” who would be neither known nor recognised by the world, but one to whom they would be able to connect and relate. That connection and relationship would be nourished and held firm through love. It is only through a loving relationship with Jesus that the disciples could connect with the Spirit, and that is the same for us, too. Only through developing a loving relationship with Jesus will we grow into loving his and our sisters and brothers, all those people with whom we engage every day of our lives
The Spirit of truth, whom our world fails to recognise, advocates in us and prompts us to identify and express what is good and right, compassionate and merciful even when life’s circumstances bring us into the presence of those who cannot recognise truth and goodness, compassion and kindness or reject them.