Homily 6th Sunday of Easter 2026
Fr. Simon Sleeman: ‘If’ you love me and keep my commandments I shall ask the Father and he will give you another Advocate to be with you for ever, the Spirit of truth…
When I began looking at the readings for today, sometime ago, it was that ‘if’, right at the start, that stopped me, in my tracks. I found it hard to move past it. I wondered why?
Maybe it was because those little words provide the meaning while the big ones look after themselves. The little ones that drive the big words into action; if’, ‘no’, ‘to’ ‘in’, ‘go’. If you lose them you lose the lot. ‘If’…. you love me and keep my commandments …I will….
Maybe it was because my Mother often quoted Rudyard Kipling’s poem ,‘If’ to us when we were children, the last lines of which are .
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
A mother talking…
‘If you love me and keep my commandments I shall ask the Father and he will give you another Advocate to be with you…that Spirit of truth…’ Jesus talking.
‘If’ ….and it seems to be one of those BIG ‘Ifs’…implies there are conditions – implies there is something required of me, …‘ if you can fill the unforgiving minute’…then….
There are conditions to enter the large world of God and have it enter us. ‘If’ you love me and keep… then’…God protecting himself from us; protecting himself from our pride and our futile, but constant attempts to be god.
‘If’ ….the gauntlet thrown down, the invitation received, the challenge set, …a huge entry point to the divine opening before us, life on the line… the Trinity of God, beckoning….to us to participate in their life of love.
‘On the whole’, Annie Dillard says, ‘I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions.’ But even the biologists among you will know the need for conditions if a seed is to germinate and grow- oxygen, warmth, water….
Oh… but we don’t like conditions or even recognise the need for them.
Conditions, commandments – no thanks – just give me the goodies, skip the conditions….the ‘ifs’…especially the big ‘ifs’…conditions cramp my style…commandments – no thank you….just send me that other Advocate…just one click should do it…Muscle and memory. I’ll take the love, Yes…. ‘that feeling you feel, when you feel, that what you feel, is a feeling you never felt before – oh that’s it… Yes….now we are talking. Good luck with that…
Carl Jung, the Swiss Psychoanalyst, says that modern human beings no longer fulfil the necessary conditions to see God – that they don’t see God because they no longer bend low enough…they are not sensible of conditions – we’ve got way above our station…busy building Towers of Babel, chasing our wild dreams and perpetrating outrageous evil.
There is something required of me as a Christian, a follower of Jesus Christ and recipient of the Holy Spirit; a commitment to look beyond the small cramped world of me where our culture would have us hang out – hungry…for stuff. And Jesus seems confident we can do it…
Jesus speaks, ‘If’ … but he also sets the ‘if’ into action.
At this last supper gathering, where he is speaking, of the ‘ifs’….he gets down on his knees and washes the feet of his disciples.
That gesture, that generous response to the BIG ‘if’. This doesn’t seem like much of an invitation but rather a degradation…especially to those who no longer bend low enough to see ….the Spirit of Truth…..beckoning….