Gospel Reflection for Sunday May 12th 2024

By Fr Brian Maher OMI

Gospel Reflection for Sunday May 12th 2024 |7th Sunday of Easter (Ascension Sunday in Ireland) John 17:11-19

Have you ever had the experience of reading a piece of Scripture you have read many times before, and hearing in it a word or phrase or sentence that suddenly takes on an importance that wasn’t there before? That was my experience this week. Even on first reading the sentence “…and while still in this world I say these things to share my joy with them to the full.” jumped out from my mobile phone screen (remember the days when words jumped from the ‘page’ at us?) and stayed with me.

Why this happened I have no idea; perhaps some word association going on in my brain that I am totally unaware of, possibly just one of those random things that happen, or maybe God speaking in the gentle breeze.

Perhaps it’s a good thing for everyone concerned. The Gospel today is typical of John recounting something that Jesus said and then adding a quite long and complex commentary to it. Diving into it might be seen by some as relevant and interesting, but almost certainly by others as irrelevant and boring. Therefore, maybe the Lord, with eternal wisdom, guided me to reflect on ‘joy’.

When Jesus said the words, “I say these things to share my joy with them to the full.” I presume he meant what he said. If so, it seems that ‘joy’ was something so important to Jesus that he just had to share it with us while still in the world. Pope Francis, just last year, said, “We either proclaim Jesus with joy — or we do not proclaim him at all.”

This seems to capture what Jesus meant; the importance, the urgency, the vibrancy of ‘joy’ as central to the Christian message.

And yet, I ask myself, where, in our Churches, our Parishes and our communities is that ‘joy’ striking and evident? I can see ‘serious’ and ‘sombre’; I can recognise ‘solemn’ and ‘dignified’; I can identify with ‘silence’ and ‘mystery’ and ‘majesty’, but where do I see, and recognise, and identify ‘joy’ in who we are and what we do?

As fewer and fewer people, especially young people, attend our Churches and as the strain on Dioceses to maintain Parishes increases, and as world issues become more urgent and problematic, it is a question we must ask ourselves – as individuals and as Christian communities.

In 1947, John Steinbeck wrote his moving and hard-hitting novella ‘The Pearl’. Set in a very impoverished part of Mexico, it tells the story of a good, caring, hard-working husband and father who, against all the odds, find a huge pearl while diving from his small boat just off the coast. His joy is immense. Not only will he be able to bring wealth and comfort to his wife and friends, but he will be able to afford proper medical care for his ill child.

Unfortunately, that is not the way things turn out. No sooner has his joy settled than he is assailed by the myriad problems and responsibilities his find brings him. Very quickly his life and that of his family begin to unravel. He cannot eat or sleep, he loses his ability to trust anyone and staggers towards paranoia. Everything he held dear, life, family, trust, honesty, community, friendship, crumble around him. Finally, his small son dies, without the medical help the pearl could have brought him. In a hugely dramatic end he and his wife, carrying their dead son, walk together to the sea and in one last act or either courage or desperation he hurls the pearl back into the sea from where it came.

What could, should and was an occasion of great joy became one of misery and loneliness.

All of us have ‘pearls’ in our lives. Some of them we find as we go through life. Others we have been given or have inherited and a few, perhaps, we have earned through sweat and tears. We carry our ‘pearls’ close to our hearts. They are what we most value in life; the things for which we would fight, and even die.

The wonderful thing about a pearl is that it is of great value; the awful thing about a pearl is that it is of great value. This, I think, is the paradox we face in life.

The things we value most, things like wealth, success and popularity, or things like faith, Church, love, tradition, justice…etc. will always pose questions for us.

The natural thing to do, and therefore the temptation, is to hang-on at all costs to what we value most. Why? Because we fear losing it or having it stolen or sullied in some way. This surely, is the tragedy of Steinbeck’s hero in ‘The Pearl’. What he found on the sea floor is so valuable, so life-changing, so important, that the fear of losing it becomes a type of paralysis, which ultimately loses for him the pearl and very nearly destroys him.

Isn’t there a lesson here for us?

We are social animals, evolved to live with others, created to share and develop together. When we do this we thrive, and progress and move, I believe, closer to the Kingdom of God.

But when we focus on any one thing to the exclusion of others, no matter how valuable, important and good it is, then we become stuck, paralysed within an ever-narrowing world, and we are in danger of losing both what we value and ourselves!

Take ‘Faith’, for example. It is so important for so many of us. it is from our Faith that we get our identity and find the beliefs, values and principles which underpin our lives. We hold on to it closely, guarding it against attack, always trying to ensure that we don’t lose it. We protect it with doctrines, authorities, rules and institutions.

All of this is good. Our Faith is important to us. It is a pearl we have found, or inherited, that we dare not lose.

It is logical, almost self-evident, that if something is of value to us, then we want others to share it. In the Church we call this ‘evangelisation’ and the Gospel calls all of us to be evangelisers. So where is the problem?

If we find ourselves focusing on our faith as the most important aspect of our lives, to the exclusion of all others, then we can only lose.

If, for example, faith calls us to evangelise, and we then focus on ‘evangelisation’ to the exclusion of tolerance, compassion, openness and acceptance of difference (all of these also of great value and good), then we find ourselves with the terrors and tragedies of The Inquisition, or ISIS, or homophobia, or racism or any of the other horrors we do to one another in the name of God.

It is, I believe, a question of balance. It always strikes me as important that Jesus avoided taking sides, even when under pressure to do so.

At one time the followers of John the Baptist wondered about Jesus and began to question his authenticity. Messengers from John came to him and said: “John fasts, lives in the desert and is poor, yet we see you eating and drinking and dining with Pharisees and tax collectors and sinners. Do you stand with John who baptised you, or are you only for yourself, or what? Tell us.”

Importantly, Jesus’ answer was not to say I am with John or I am not with John. His answer was simply to say, “Tell John the blind see, the lame walk, the dumb speak, sins are forgiven…”  His answer was clear. Look at what you see me do and then make up your own mind.

Or when his enemies showed him a coin and tried to trap him into either being ‘against Rome’ by saying that taxes should only be paid to the Jewish Temple, as many wanted, or appearing to be ‘for Rome’, by saying that taxes should be paid to Rome as demanded by them. The wanted him to take sides.

His answer refused to take sides: “Give to Ceasar the things that are Ceasar’s to God the things that are God’s.” (Jesus was a shrewd politician. He didn’t answer the question by using a lot of words!)

It is a lack of balance, I think, which caused the tragedy of ‘the Pearl’, and perhaps, explains some of the tragedies affecting our Church.

The fear of losing something, even something important and of value, will never bring us joy.

The fear of losing something, and the need to hold and protect it at all costs will keep us constantly serious and sombre, solemn and always suspicious and looking over our shoulder. Sadly, too like many faces of the Church. We can build castles and put up ramparts to protect us, but they can never bring us joy.

We will always come back to the same paradox: “It is in giving that we receive; It is in losing that we gain; it is in dying that we rise.”

When Jesus said, “…and while still in this world I say these things to share my joy with them to the full.”  He was asking us a very important question: What is it that brings you Joy?

Are we confident enough about our ‘faith’ (or anything else we value) that we would risk losing it?

Holding on to anything at all costs will always isolate us more and more; that will make us even more fearful of losing it; in turn we bunker-down and hold on even more tightly and gradually our world gets narrower and narrower until it is lost and gone forever.

There can never be joy in that.

Let me finish with Pope Francis again. In “the Joy of the Gospel” we find: “The biggest threat of all (to evangelization) gradually takes shape: ‘The grey pragmatism of the daily life of the Church, in which all appears to proceed normally, while in reality faith is wearing down and degenerating into small-mindedness.”  (EG 83)

This may seem a very negative way to finish…but simply reverse it and we have what Jesus is offering us today: “…and while still in this world I say these things to share my joy with them to the full.”

I know which of the two I like.

What about you?

Many thanks,

Brian.

If you have any comments, questions or thoughts on this scripture reflection, please feel welcome to email me at b.maher@oblates.ie

Go out to the whole world; proclaim the Good News