Mass readings for the 6th Sunday of Easter:
Acts 8.5-8, 14-17 Psalm 66.1-7, 16 & 20 1 Peter 3.15-18 John 14.15-21
These days it is difficult to know who is telling the truth; who is being honest and not trying to sell us on something, trick us into something, scare us into something; how good to hear that Jesus promises the Church “the Spirit of Truth.” – Thank you, Lord.
But that’s not the same as being given the truth. Indeed, we know from these gospel verses that Jesus is talking about the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, the Advocate, the Comforter, but also, the one who will lead us to the truth. Okay, so isn’t that sort of the same thing as being given the truth? Can we to imagine that we have access to the truth like it’s a big heavenly library, and the Holy Spirit the librarian. When we have a question, we just go to him and check out the book we need that has the answer. We know that’s not how it works.
Rather in all matters of determining the truth, be it in terms of Christian teaching, or in this world, figuring out what’s going on in economically, politically, culturally, etc. with hopes of correcting or improving matters, we have tremendous conflict, and contending parties all claiming they’ve got the truth of things, they have the experts, and we need to listen to them.
But surely the Church can be relied upon to be truthful. Well, none us here are naïve about this, I trust.
St. Augustine wrote and spoke of a visible and an invisible Church. Yes, there are the institutional structures, but the Church is really a spiritual reality. And in our Catholic tradition we say there are four “marks” or indicators that tell us if what we see in any given situation is truly the Church or not. The Church is, One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic – it demonstrates unity, sanctity, understand itself to be universal in the sense that the gospel is for everyone; that we faithfully pass on what we have received, the faith first given to the Apostles.
So, caution in assessing the reliability of those who say they are of the Church is called for. Consider the scene in which Jesus makes his promise of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, to those gathered at the Last Supper, we need to remember who was there: Judas Iscariot was. He won’t be getting it. He is not be part of the Church.
So, to be clear, Jesus can speak to a roomful of people, a crowd of 5000 in a field, an intimate gathering of his closest disciples, but that doesn’t mean everyone there is a true and faithful follower. So, some of those who hear his words won’t receive the graces he offers, or in the instance of the Holy Spirit, that person of the Trinity, because they don’t have a will and desire to follow him faithfully and to serve him – whether consciously or not, like Judas, they serve themselves.
Today there are those who call themselves Christian yet mine the scriptures and the tradition, not in search of truth, but rather looking for loopholes. They are like the Pharisees who weren’t looking for truth but rather power, and to get that by winning the debates by cleverness, but also through distortion and misrepresentation, by laying rhetorical traps for others, by making accusations.
So, why doesn’t God just make it easier for us: just give us the truth? Then we would know truth from lies.
Well, because, and to lift and adapt a quote from a Tom Cruise movie of thirty years ago, “we can’t handle the truth.” It would be overwhelming. Our minds could not encompass it; indeed, the whole of truth is God. Perfect Justice is God, absolute Love is God, the complete Truth is God. It’s too much.
Remember when Moses asks to see God on Mt. Horeb – God tells the great prophet that he can’t handle it; so, God tells Moses to hide in the cleft of a rock, and to glance up as God passes by him. That experience of catching just a glimpse is utterly transforming, and transfiguring. To go among the Israelites in the camp he had to put a veil over his face – he became alienated from them because they could barely stand his presence. We still need to be in the world to do Christ’s will; we need to be approachable, still in the world but not of it.
Yet, God will not leave us abandoned here with no means of approaching the truth on a basis that we can handle.
Throughout the history of the Church, as a controversy arises, as an important question presses, the Holy Spirit has guided the Church to the answers to her questions.
In recent weeks, at the daily masses, we’ve heard in tandem with passages from John’s gospel in which Jesus speaks at length about the coming of the Holy Spirit, passages from the Book of Acts that detail the process by which the early Church of the Apostles found the answer to the question, “what do we do with the Gentiles who confess Jesus as Lord?”
And it wasn’t a straightforward journey; the answers had to be earned; faith demonstrated, and a willingness to sacrifice to gain insights shown.
Remember last week’s Gospel when Philip asks Jesus to “show us the Father, and we will be satisfied?” And Jesus makes it quite plain to them all that the path to truth is a hard one, that you must follow him in his way which is the way of the cross.
The Holy Spirit, as with any guide on any trip, does not magically deliver us to the destination, but says to us, if you want the truth you must search, go on the journey to find it and I will be with you. I’ll keep you from going down the wrong road, getting lost in the forests and fields, but you will need to listen to me. My prayer for the ongoing Synodal process that the Pope has initiated is that it will be marked by just this kind of humility.
We need to listen, and as Jesus tells us, we will be guided to the truth. Search and you will find. Yet in some instances, to paraphrase the great Bishop Fulton Sheen, the truth is easily found, but hard to face.
It’s hard for a lot of us to face the truth of who we are, of what we’ve done, of what we’ve done and who we have thought ourselves to be because we rather like what the world has taught us, the same world that Jesus says cannot receive the truth. In my own life, in turning from Christ as a young man, in embracing the world that told me I was free as a bird and could define myself in whatever terms I wished, live my life however I might, I finally came to understand that “truth” of the world was really a lie.
I suspect many know they won’t like what they will find if they go looking for the truth because it will be a summoning to greater sacrifice, indeed death to themselves rather than an endorsement of them as being fine just the way they are.
No wonder there are so many who prefer to declare themselves “agnostic” – oh, how can we know the truth of it all, these big moral questions? Let’s keep an open mind, and let each choose their own truth. Let’s be “broadminded.” To quote Sheen again, he once said our problem isn’t intolerance or bigotry so much as we’re being overrun by broadmindedness. “Tolerance,” he said, “applies to people, not principles.” Which is to say we should abide sinners, welcome them in because we are all sinners, but here we have agreed to be guided to the truth by the Holy Spirit. However, we can’t tolerate false principles that arise from errors, omissions of truth, and lies.
I think I’ve told you before that our problem with so much of the media is not so much that they outright tell lies, but that too many withhold information that doesn’t fit with the story they want us to believe. In this post-Christian era, we cannot assume that “the spirit of Truth” is at work among those who profess to inform and educate us; and there are many movements afoot these days, and all profess to hold the truth of who we are as human beings, what the solution is to achieve that perfect love of God, his perfect justice. Some will hold colourful parades and others intensely angry protests, each in their own way seeking to convince us they have the truth, and we need to follow them, and do as they say. They don’t really want us delving into the messy complexity of the issues, uncovering the inconvenient facts, but rather for us to settle for their simplistic answers.
It’s funny you know. The Apostle Philip had asked to see the Father, the whole truth of God, but wasn’t given that. But he was shown the Resurrection, and in the power of that truth, went on to evangelize the world. In the scriptures today we hear about him as a fearless proclaimer of the Gospel. Philip knows its not about having all the answers, the whole truth, but rather it’s in the way of Christ; this will lead us to the perfection of God, who is Justice, Love, and Truth.
Amen.