Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
The lectionary
readings for the Sundays after Easter are full of instructions for disciples
about how to live as Jesus taught without his physical presence in their midst.
Jesus is preparing believers, including us, to consider not only his journey
through death to life, but our own as well.
The setting today is
the upper room in Jerusalem. Jesus and his closest friends are at the supper
that will be their last together. Their hearts were torn with anxiety and fear.
How does the heart feast at a banquet of disappointment and loss? What could possibly
free the human heart from being troubled at such a time?
Jesus instructs: “Do
not let your hearts be troubled.” Given the context, it’s not hard to
understand why this text is so often used in the burial liturgy. Death troubles
our hearts and we want to find some balance, stability, and harmony in the face
of it. This text, however, is about more
than the afterlife. It has something to say right here and now. It’s speaks to
the very circumstances that trouble our hearts. At the edge of his own grave,
Jesus means to reassure his disciples that his death is not the end, but the
beginning of the room he is making for them in God. The disciples are
incredulous. So are we, much of the time, especially when we are frightened or
threatened by change or loss in whatever form it takes.
Jesus recognizes
that their hearts and our hearts are already troubled. He is not warning them
or us about a future condition. He knows the troubling has already begun. None
of us get through this life without a troubled heart. I don’t think we can look
at the pain of the world, the suffering of those we love, or our own wounds and
not have a troubled heart. At least, I hope we can’t.
Even as he was telling the disciples to not
let their hearts be troubled, I suspect that he was telling himself as much as
them. By naming what’s going on between them,
he’s reminding them and us that not letting our hearts be troubled begins with
looking into our hearts to see and name what troubles it? That means facing
ourselves, our lives, our world. That may be the first and most difficult thing
Jesus asks of us in today’s gospel. He also reminds us that our lives and the world are not defined
or limited to what troubles.
Throughout these
final discourses, Jesus speaks of the experience of abiding, of indwelling: Him
in the Father, the Father in Him, Him in us, us in the Father. He is telling
them and us that we are not the center. It is not our success, accomplishments,
position, or power. God is our center, abiding within us. So wherever we go, whatever
we face, whoever we are, God is within. Regardless of what troubles, God abides
in us.
He encourages them
and us to not lose sight of this truth in the midst of what’s going on. When
hearts are troubled and we don’t know the way we start living outside of
ourselves, and when we do life is defined by and focused on external things.
He’s inviting us to live from the inside out, instead of from the outside in. That’s
the promise of Easter in the midst of whatever troubles our heart. It won’t
take away our worries or fix our problems, but it gives us a place of stability
and helps us know what to hold on to and what to let go of. It connects us to
abundant life and to each other.
The world has a
multitude of answers as to what will relieve our hearts. Jesus has only one:
“Believe in God, believe also in me”. When John speaks of believing in his
Gospel, it is almost exclusively as an outward, active, and intimate commitment
with Jesus. It is a giving over, an entrusting of our whole self to God,
independent of outward circumstances. Belief requires self-surrender. As those
first disciples at that table were sharing the feast of loss with Jesus, he
attempts to assure them that even in the face of what lies ahead, they will not
be forgotten, they will not be separated. The place he is preparing for them,
for us, is God’s own life.
With our
post-Easter eyes, it might seem easier for us to skip to the end of the story.
If we do that, we lose sight of the fact that something always dies for
something new to be birthed. Birth and death are repeating cycles in the
narrative of our lives. In both the delivery room and the hospice room, those
present are changed. Birth and death are the bookends holding our stories of
transformation. Visions of who we are and are becoming give us life, even as a
previous sense of ourselves dies. In these moments we often echo Thomas in
asking how we can know the way if we do not know where God is. With Philip, we
claim that we will be satisfied if we can just see. As hospice chaplain and
midwife to ourselves and each other, our role is to be fully present, even as
we cannot see and do not know what comes next in our life.
God’s promise to abide in us, within us, to love us, to make room for us, to know and be known by us, never ends. Nothing can undo us because God has claimed and named us. That is enough to sustain and support us. That is enough to empower us to live as witnesses to that love.
+Amen.
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