I used to be really
jealous of the people who had known Jesus during his earthly ministry; the
zeroth generation of disciples, if you like.
The fact that they got to walk and talk with Jesus, to converse, to eat,
to hunger… to interact with him in the same way as we interact when presented
with any other regular living human.
But, as time has gone on, I’ve become more and more appreciative of
living in this time, the time of the first, second, third… whatever number
generation we’re on of being disciples, the time of the church.
For this is
the time when the Spirit has been sent us.
This is the time when the Spirit dwells with us, dwells in us, closer to
the center of our hearts than we are to ourselves. God has poured out upon us the gift of the
Spirit, not a gift frail and forgetful like ourselves; the gift is the giver:
in the Spirit God is tenderly and powerfully present to us, even more intensely
than Jesus was with his disciples in the flesh almost 2,000 years ago, speaking
to them of this gift that was to come in the upper room.
Jesus said,
“we will come to you;” the Spirit’s presence is the fullness of the
presence of Christ, the fullness of the presence of God the Father, enlivening
and sanctifying the hearts of all who welcome Him in love. It’s a gift given in baptism and strengthened
in confirmation, and it’s glorious, but sometimes it’s not very obvious.
Sometimes
we can articulate very clearly that we know how close God is to us, but He
doesn’t feel close, in fact he feels rather distant. And sometimes there’s something we can do
about that; sometimes it’s as simple as opening up our spiritual mouths and
taking a deep breath full of the Spirit in whom we dwell, asking in
prayer. Sometimes, there’s something
clogging our airways, some sin to be cleansed of, and that asking in prayer
takes the form of confession and reconciliation. But, we will always find a limit, we will
always find that our awareness of God’s presence is less vibrant than its
reality. And it is painful, sometimes
terribly so, but righteous to experience that distance as longing. In this life, God’s presence and action in
our lives is always somewhat hidden. We
see by dawn’s first light, and we long for fullness of day.
And one of
the resources God has given us to sustain us in our longing is the gift of hope
which is nourished by the vision of the future that we heard in our reading
from the book of Revelation. We heard
tell of the city which is to come, in which God will dwell with His peoples, and
there will be no hiddenness. The walls
will be transparent. In this almost
unimaginable world that is to come, the walls will be at once beautiful jasper,
in fact more beautiful, and transparent as glass, in fact more
transparent. We will gaze at God with
nothing to obstruct our view, and feel his lasting embrace with no barrier to dull
our touch. One of the options for our
funeral rite looks forward to this day in these words: “For seeing you, our
God, as you are, we shall be like you for all the ages and praise you without
end.” That perfect sight of God which is
to come will transform us into His likeness.
Any impatience we feel with ourselves for not growing holier quicker will
be gone.
The reading
told us that there will be no Temple in that eternal city; we won’t need
one. But now we do. Now, we need things, people, places, set
aside, dedicated to remind us of God’s presence of which we can so easily be
forgetful. We need sacraments, we need
to join with our fellow Christians in worship.
And so many of you who are watching this Mass on television are deprived
of that, through illness, infirmity or incarceration. I pray that you can find signs and symbols of
the reality of God’s presence in your lives, because we need those as humans,
social, embodied creatures. Watching
Mass on television can never do for us what physically participating in one in
church can. So, for those of you who are
deprived of that possibility by circumstance, know that that Church gets how
hard this is for you. You are distant
from us in body, you are foremost in our prayers, and we long for the day when
we will stand shoulder to shoulder, saints among saints in the halls of heaven,
praising the Lamb forever.
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