Our journey of Passover slowly comes to an end; the station is already in our view, we can see the spiritual platform onto which we will soon disembark. This journey began mid-February, on Ash Wednesday when we were invited to leave our spiritual slavery. The circumstances of the second lockdown were fittingly gloomy; our locked churches underlined the mood. Forty days later, having crossed the desert, we arrived at the transfer station of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. Again, the reopening of our churches for Palm Sunday and following Holy Week celebrations emphasised the changed spiritual mood. We crossed (excuse the pun) from darkness into light; we embarked on that part of the journey when ‘things can only get better.’ Over the last six Sundays of Easter, we have been learning what it means to be Jesus’s disciple. Today’s gospel reading, part of a much longer piece, is like a seal stamped by Jesus on the certificate of discipleship. After next Sunday, liturgically we will return to ordinary time; again, it rather fittingly coincides with the gradual lifting of the restrictions and the return ever closer to normality. We are nearly there…
The main theme that has weaved through the gospel readings of Eastertide was community. From the very morning of the resurrection, when the women who had arrived at the empty tomb were instructed to go and tell the disciples. Another two of them, fearful and broken on the escape route to Emmaus, having recognised Jesus in the breaking of bread, instantly returned to the community in Jerusalem. The doubtful Thomas had his personal meeting with the risen Christ in the midst of the community, not in a back alley without any witnesses. Jesus either used metaphors – as with the Good Shepherd or the vine – or talked directly about the necessity of the community of faith, bound by mutual charitable love of one another. By His own selfless sacrifice – ‘for their sake I consecrate myself’ – Jesus has broken the shackles of the original sin: selfishness.
This is the root of our problems. When you think about it, the traditional seven deadly sins – lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride – are different manifestations of selfishness. In the figurative story of Adam and Eve’s fall in the garden of Eden, they wanted to be like God; to put themselves in the centre around which the whole world should revolve. In fact, their symbolic story is the story of each human being. The original sin we all have been born with is selfishness. It comes ‘naturally’, while the opposite attitude requires a lot of effort and active commitment on a daily basis. Modern western culture has significantly drifted away from its Christian roots and replaced them with the individualism that eventually shatters relationships or turns them into poor, transactional substitutes. Social and cultural changes of the last few decades – hailed as liberation from moral shackles – in many cases turned out to produce worse adverse effects. The so-called ‘rape culture’ that we may have heard about in the media; fatherless children heroically brought up by single mothers; divisive and entrenched political or social tribalism… These are just a few examples of changes in our society. I don’t look back through rose-tinted glasses as if the past were perfect because it obviously wasn’t. What changed was the social acceptance for such a shift in moral values.
Today’s gospel reading is a grand prayer by Jesus the High Priest to the Father for his disciples: ‘they belong to the world no more than I belong to the world. I am not asking you to remove them from the world, but to protect them […]. As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world’. What does it mean for each one of us to be sent into the world? To ‘act […] as a witness to his resurrection.’ At the start of St John’s gospel, Jesus defined His mission in this famous passage: ‘God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but so that the world might be saved through him.’ (John 3:17) It’s easy to moan about the state of affairs; it’s easy to lament and whine that the world isn’t as it used to be. It’s easy to condemn the world and let it burn while we, the ‘better ones’, try to survive in our own bubble. Paradoxically, by doing so, we would fall into the same trap as the rest of the world: selfish individualism. To act as a witness to Jesus’ resurrection means that each one of us is called to selfless charitable love. The end of Eastertide next Sunday isn’t the end of our spiritual journey; it’s the transfer station from where we will be sent out into the world not to condemn it, but to save it in the name of Jesus: ‘There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.’ (Acts 4:12)
