You certainly know the saying: “Jesus is coming…Look busy!”. Well, I guess it could come as a surprise for many to realize that the Gospel says quite the opposite.
We are in this portion of John’s Gospel known as the “Farewell Discourse” – the last instructions Jesus gave to his disciples before his death and Resurrection – and although very different in form, these instructions are basically the same than they are in other parts of the Gospel, especially in Luke-Acts, where Jesus asks his disciples to remain in Jerusalem (until they have received the Holy Spirit). In John’s, as we have read today, Jesus commands his disciples to “abide” in him – it is a more spiritual way of putting it (when Luke insists on a geographical location), but the idea is the same.
As Jesus departs the disciples and they wonder what they are called to do to continue his legacy, Jesus, basically, urges them to do nothing. Or at least, to start by doing nothing.
And of course – this is where it gets very counter cultural. In our saying “Jesus is coming, look busy”, we’re maybe making a joke, but it says a lot about the way we think about things. We need to get stuff done. A few centuries ago, doing nothing (at least in Europe) was considered the privilege of the rich and actually not being busy was a sign of an elevated social status but it’s probably the opposite today in our culture: if you want people to think well of you, you’d better be busy and “accomplish”. And so if you want Jesus to think well of you, well, get busy.
And of course, there is a little truth to that – that’s the way we tend to run our churches, with programs, classes, outreach ministries and all sorts of activities…. Not necessarily because we want Jesus to think well of us, we do it from the heart, but we also think that’s really what we are supposed to do, what is expected. But today we are invited to back to the Scriptures to really hear those words:
Jesus asks his disciples, first, to stay put.
Which may – or may not – be doing nothing. Actually, it seems that for Jesus, this is the first thing we need to do if we want to be productive, if we want to bear fruit. We need to root ourselves in Him – not in order to flee from the world or to be shield from it – but to experience God’s love, because the only fruit worth bearing is to share of the love, and how could we share what we haven’t received?
Last week, I had a very interesting conversation with my young cousin. She is going to get married this summer and has been doing marriage counseling with her fiancé at his church. He is a staunch catholic and she has no religion whatsoever– she has been raised by parents who are atheists and haven’t given her any kind of religious education. And so, as you can imagine, going through the motions of marriage preparation with a lot of other couples who have been born and raised in the church isn’t easy for her. She has a lot of questions, and not many answers. But one of the things she told me last week really stuck with me. She said that she felt sad that during the whole training, she heard so many times that “marriage was hard” and that basically, it was bound to fail if it wasn’t for God, and she did not know this God!
So she asked me if I believed that her marriage was bound to fail since she didn’t know God. So I thought about it for a few minutes and I told her: Well, it’s like you were asking me if your marriage was bound to fail without love. I would probably say yes. Because God is love, so yes, probably your marriage won’t work without God. But if we really believe that God is the creator and at the root of our being, well basically nothing can work and nothing should be working in this world without God.
(Which is basically what Jesus tells his disciples today: Without me, you can do nothing.)
And so, you see, as we were having this conversation I realized something quite distressing about the church. My cousin who has no religious education at all, and who is yet of very good will going through this program with (and mainly for) her fiancé is missing the whole point about what our faith is about – because there is no Christian around to tell her – at least not in a way she could experience it – that God is love, that God is already present in this love she shares with her fiancé.
How sad, indeed.
In the Letter we have just read, John reminds his community 30 times that God is love and that our job – our first job and the job Jesus asks his disciples to do today – is to experience that God is love and experience the love of God.
We want to do good. We mean well. We try to attract young people, to make Church fun or relevant or even to offer some solid education – some churches even manage to do all of that in the same time and that’s awesome – but we forget to share our experience of love, to enable the experience of God in our churches. And I think it happens, no so much because we are unwilling – but maybe just because we haven’t done this experience – we haven’t allowed ourselves – to do this experience for ourselves. And to me, this is the question Jesus is asking his disciples (and is asking us) today: How are you going to share the good news, if it isn’t good news for you, how are you going to share the love, if you haven’t felt loved, allowed yourself to be loved and allow God to love you? As much as you mean well, as much as you will get busy, even for the sake of the Kingdom, you won’t get anything done – at least you won’t grow any fruit worthy of the kingdom.
The first thing and the most important thing we have to do as Christians is to open ourselves to experience God’s love as it was revealed in the life, death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s the only way we can show love and become the witnesses we are meant to be.
So how do we do that? Well, as I’ve said earlier it looks like the Gospel points us in the direction of not doing anything – but it’s not exactly true. Jesus commands us to abide in him, to abide in his love and it require from us a lot of intentionality. If I were to translate this passage, I would probably use the verb “soak” – because this is what I hear Jesus say: “soak yourself in my love”, “”Let my love bleed onto you in the soaking, let my love transform you so you can become love and by this, you will testify of my love, not only by what you say and do, but with your mere presence, because of who you are, because of whom you have become”.
So I would invite you to think about that a bit more this week: How can we make it possible for us to experience the love of God through Christ? And how much are we willing to realize that this is the most important thing to do?
Maybe we need to make more time using the “tools” we are given in Christ to receive God’s love: time for prayer, reading the Scriptures, receiving the sacraments. But maybe the answer is deeper, more personal, maybe we need to open ourselves to God, to accept to be in God’s hands and stop living our life as if everything depended on us. Maybe we don’t need so much to change our habits, maybe we need to change our hearts and learn to be vulnerable, to let God do the pruning, the cleansing and the growing. Do you ever feel it’s hard to let yourself be loved by people, or do you find it hard to love yourself? It’s not an easy thing to let ourselves be loved by God, and that’s why the Gospel insists so much on telling us we need to accept to receive God’s love. On Wednesday we will resume our Noonday prayer, and each week during this season we will share teaching about prayer. I invite you to join us so we can learn together how to abide in this place of greater intimacy.