PaddlingPadre

Last week, we heard about how Christ, the Son, is in the Father, and how the Father is likewise in the Son, and I preached about how this reveals the Trinitarian nature of God, and also the Trinitarian nature of Christ’s mission as well as the Trinitarian nature of the life to which, in Christ, we are called to participate.

And today this Trinitarian mystery continues to unfold as we keep reading from St. John’s gospel, as Jesus promises his disciples that he will send them the Advocate, the Holy Spirit. And so, what can we glean from our Lord’s words concerning this Advocate?

No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, then you will also know my Father.

These words, and indeed this entire passage, are very Trinitarian in character. As Christians we of course believe in the Trinity, and indeed the truth of the Triune nature of God is so indispensable that one cannot be a Christian without it; it is one of the requirements for the validity of baptism that it be done according to the Trinitarian formula and with a Trinitarian understanding, such that groups who baptize without this belief, such as the Unitarians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Mormons, do not actually baptize at all and so are not really Christians.

I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

This, of course, is what a shepherd does for his sheep. His task is to pasture them, to provide for them, to protect them. And you can see just how important the shepherd is to the survival and prospering of his sheep if you consider what happens in his absence. Without the shepherd, the sheep become scattered and lost. They fall as prey to wolves and other wild beasts. They are powerless against those who would harm them, against thieves and robbers.  And so it isn’t merely true that the shepherd is there to bring life to the sheep, but, for the sheep, there is no other way by which life might be found!

According to legend, there was a city named Silene in Libya, next to which was a stagnant and deadly pond in which lived a dragon, who would rise up out of the pond and by his breath poison the entire country. To appease the dragon, the people of the city gave him every day two sheep. And when this failed, they gave to the dragon each day a man and a sheep. And when this failed, they even offered up to the dragon by lot their children and young people, until one day the lot fell upon the king’s daughter, and she was led out amid much weeping, dressed in bridal clothes in mourning for a wedding she would never see, to the edge of this stinking pond.

Comenzando por Moisés y siguiendo con todos los profetas, les explicó todos los pasajes de la Escritura que se referían a él.

The name of St. Thomas, on account of this famous episode, is always for us connected with doubt. It is as though we have been so conditioned to make the mental jump from the name of Thomas to Doubting Thomas almost without thinking, and surely there is something unfair about that. Yet at the same time, there is certainly an element of hard-heartedness in Thomas’ initial unbelief, when the other disciples, whom Thomas knows and trusts, have seen the risen Lord and have testified to Thomas regarding the truth of the Resurrection. And so when we hear Jesus’ words to Thomas, Be not unbelieving, but believe, we may rightly hear in them a gentle sort of rebuke, as Thomas’ doubt, however psychologically understandable it might have been, was in the end unreasonable.

Today, we stand in the aftermath of something remarkable. Of course, the events to which we have already been witness this week are even in their own right remarkable – on a merely human level we have seen the drama of betrayal and suffering and death, the anguish of a grieving mother, the disappointment of all those who had hoped that Jesus might be the one to redeem Israel. All of this makes for a moving tragedy.

Tonight Jesus stands on the brink of his Passion, Esta noche, Jesús se encuentra en el umbral de su Pasión, and knowing this, sabiéndolo having loved his own in the world to the end, habiendo amado a los suyos que estaban en el mundo hasta el extremo, he leaves them with a great testament of his love. les deja un gran testamento de su amor. Love, of course, El amor, por supuesto, is never from St. John’s mind in any of his writings. nunca está ausente del pensamiento de San Juan en ninguno de sus escritos.  God is love, as he says elsewhere in his first epistle, Dios es amor, como dice en otro lugar en su primera epístola, and in this the love of God was made manifest among us, y en esto se manifestó el amor de Dios entre nosotros: that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. en que Dios envió a su Hijo único al mundo para que vivamos por medio de Él.

We have just heard St. Matthew’s account of our Lord’s passion, from his entry into Jerusalem to his death and burial. It is an account that, however familiar it might be to us, yet moves us again and again to compassion for this innocent man, cruelly tortured and put to death by the very ones he came to save.

 One may well sympathize with the suffering that Mary and Martha, to say nothing of Lazarus, are left to endure during this episode. You can imagine how things must have gone, how Lazarus must have fallen ill, how, in spite of the care of his sisters, his condition must have dangerously worsened, and of how with growing alarm their minds must have turned to their friend Jesus, who had worked so many healings and so many wonders. With what great anxiety, then, must they have sent word to Jesus, an anxiety that was, I am sure, tempered also with hope because of who they knew Jesus to be, but a hope that, with each passing hour, must have waned until that final disappointment and agony that was the death of their brother.