Wednesday, Sixth Week of Easter
A little earlier in this gospel of John, Jesus had said to his disciples, ‘I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father’. Now Jesus says to his disciples that, when the Spirit of truth comes, ‘all he tells you will be taken from what is mine’, and ‘he will say only what he has learnt (from me)’. Just as Jesus has been making known what he has heard from the Father, in the future, beyond the time when Jesus is lifted up on the cross and in glory, the Spirit will make know all that he has heard from Jesus. The role of the Spirit in our lives is to open up the word of Jesus, the word of God, for us. There is a richness and a depth to the Lord’s word that we can only explore over time with the help of the Holy Spirit. As Saint Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians, ‘we have received… the Spirit that is from God so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God’. At the beginning of today’s gospel reading Jesus tells his disciples, ‘I still have many things to say to you but they would be too much for you now’. Jesus has already said a lot to them, as much as they were capable of hearing. It will be the role of the Holy Spirit to keep opening up more of all that Jesus wants to say to them. There is always a ‘more’ to what the Lord wants to say to us. He opens up as much of his word to us as we are capable of hearing at any particular time. The Holy Spirit will continue to open up further depths of the Lord’s word to us, if we keep open the eyes and ears of our heart. As Jesus says to Nathanael at the beginning of this gospel of John, ‘You will see greater things than these… you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man’. The Lord always has more for us to hear and to see, until that eternal moment when we will hear the music of heaven and see the Lord face to face.