Sixth Sunday of Easter

May 25, 2025

John 14:23-29

In his book, Beginning to Pray, Archbishop Anthony Bloom relates this incident. It is the time of Russian Civil War in 1917, a young mother of three children is in hiding, and on the run, because her husband is serving in what was left of the Imperial Troops of the Czar. The Red Army is hunting her down because of this, and plan to kill her as a traitor. The village she lives in had fallen into the hands of the Red Army. She hides in an abandoned house and is waiting for a chance to escape. One evening a 20 year old woman who lives nearby visits her. This young woman is a stranger to the mother. The young woman asks the mother if she what her name is. When the mother tells her she who she is, and the young woman tells the mother that she had been discovered, and the soldiers would come that night and kill her; the young woman said, “You must escape at once.” The mother pointed to the young children and asks, “How can I?”

And then, the young woman says a startling thing: “You can go, because I will stay behind and call myself by your name when they come to get you.” The mother says, “But you will be shot!” The young woman says, “Yes, but I have no children.” And she stayed behind.

This true story brings to life what Jesus asks of us in last Sundays gospel: “I give you a new commandment: love one another...as I have loved you.” This Sunday Jesus goes further: “Whoever loves me, will keep my word, and my Father will love him...and we will come...and make our dwelling in him.” Jesus also tells us not to let our hearts be troubled or afraid. And why? Because Jesus is not leaving us all alone; he is leaving his Holy Spirit with us, and that he will return to us. He leaves us his peace.

But where is his peace? His peace is in loving one another as he loved us, and when we keep his word, His Father will join the Holy Spirit and with Jesus will make his home in us. The point is that God is not with us out there somewhere; no, God is living inside us at this very moment. It is this God-in-us that makes us able to love another person in the same way that he loved us...even to the point of dying for them. Jesus calls each one of us to have absolute trust in him, and therefore have his peace. When we have this peace, we can share in Jesus' power to bring life from death.

This brings us right back to the true story we began with. How could a 20 year old woman bring herself to do what that she did in 1917? The woman's name is Natalie. Can we imagine Natalie in that damp, dark house? She may have felt like Christ in the garden of Gethsemane asking that the cup might pass if it is that Father's will; but, she took the words of Jesus literally and to heart. She loves the mother of those children just as Jesus loves us..and had the Holy Spirit within her. The Spirit gave her the courage to act, and the power to witness.

You and I may not be called on to love one of God' own children to the point of death as Jesus and Natalie did; but it can seem just as hard to give up our own will, or position, or possessions, or reputation, or give credit to someone else for a thing we did, so than another may live and in doing this, we love another as Jesus loves them. The peace Jesus speaks of is the peace that is brought about by the Kingdom of God being made present; a kingdom where all people matter.

Today’s real borders are not between nations, but between powerful and powerless, free and fettered, privileged and humiliated. Today no walls can separate humanitarian or human rights crises in one part of the world from national security crises in another. Scientists tell us that the world is so small and interdependent that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon forest can generate a storm on the other side of the earth. The principle is known as the ‘Butterfly Effect.’ Kofi Annan expressed this idea and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001. Today we realize more than ever, that the world of human activity also has its own “Butterfly Effect,” for better or for worse. The classical example is the history-making growth of Christianity in the first century by the Spirit-transformed lives of the apostles and early Christians, just as it transformed Natalie’s life, and is poised to transform our own lives.

Fr. John Tran