For those we love, we wish the best for them.
It’s true, isn’t it!
As parents, you spend most of your lives doing just that. You will make great sacrifices if it is for the true benefit of your children or the one you love.
It is one of the most reassuring qualities of the human heart. We do it again and again, almost without even thinking.
I have a sense of this when I reflect on the final words of Jesus to his chosen on the night of the Last Supper. For four full chapters in John’s Gospel, Jesus pours his heart out, saying again and again in different words how he loves them and how he will care for them. He calls them ‘friends’ not ‘servants’, because he has shared everything with them that he has learnt from his Father.
In this long conversation of Jesus there is a recurring theme: the desire of Jesus to introduce his followers to his deepest experience as a human being – the profound and loving relationship he had with the God whom he called “Abba! Father!”
He is leaving his followers and he is conscious of their sorrow and sense of loss. He speaks to that: Believe in God and believe in me! Do not let your hearts be troubled. He acknowledges their experience, but he does not wish to leave them there in their sadness and sorrow. He wants them to know his joy, the joy that comes from remaining in the love of his Father.
This is all heady, heart-felt stuff, and hard to take in in such a moment of loss and stress.
As with the disciples, so with us!
Jesus takes us where we are but shows us clearly the way forward.
He counsels something positive: “Remain in my love!”
We may feel pushed to the limit, hassled by the demands of our workaday world, caring for growing children, afraid of mounting bills and expenses, fearing sickness or the approach of old age; or as a prisoner of the past, caught up in past, hurtful experiences.
You name it, we can feel it.
Jesus will meet us where we are, but he wants to take us beyond that point to a place of healing and peace to a space in our hearts and our lives that is blessed by a sense of the powerful and loving Presence of the God who is his Abba.
How long will that take?
As long as it is necessary!
Sometimes we may have a sense of just going around in circles, getting nowhere fast, or caught in the pressures of life that do not leave much time for these deeper, more personal considerations. But the hunger of the human heart for a peace which the world does not give, that is, the gift of Jesus, remains within us.
But we have rituals that remind us who we are. And how important are those rituals!
Yes, they remind us who we are!
Let’s remember that! It is important to know who we are.
And the Eucharist is such a ritual.
Sometimes we come to church, and perhaps leave as though little has happened. Other times we are touched deeply and refreshed. Whatever the experience, we keep coming back because we believe in the promises of Jesus. We know he has the words of eternal life and this takes us to prayer, again and again, especially the prayer of the Eucharist.
Part of the ritual of the Eucharist is Communion. And what an awesome act it is!
The priest says, “The Body of Christ!” You answer, “Amen!” We touch into the mystery of “One for the other” that is beyond words. “Here I am for you!”
An ordinary moment but truly awesome in meaning and potential!
Here in the Eucharist, Jesus takes us where we are and says, “Here I am for you! Be refreshed. I meet you where you are but I want to take you further, into your own heart where the Father and I dwell.
This is the gist of the conversation of Jesus with his disciples in John’s account of the Last Supper. It is what we celebrate here every day and with the assembled community on the weekend. “I am here for you!”
“Remain in my love!
If you do, you will climb mountains!”