for May 11
Monday of the Fifth Week of Easter

If you’ve ever had the privilege and headache of buying a home, you’ve probably heard a realtor say that finding the right place to live is all about location, location, location. Well, today’s gospel is a bit of a twist on that saying. For the author of the fourth gospel, the key to finding the way to live with God is all about relationship, relationship, relationship.

What Jesus speaks of again and again and again in these few verses is not just any relationship, but a very specific commitment to love him and listen to all that he has said. In that love, we will find God, the Father who Jesus reveals. In this gospel, it is not observing the law or good works like feeding the hungry or mighty signs like raising the dead that lead us to God. These things, although good and necessary, are to come from and point toward the Father’s love. Nor is it a warm fuzzy feeling or generalized good will to which Jesus calls his disciples—and through them, us. Such things are passing. No, to live in the love of which Jesus speaks means that we are to dwell with God, to remain in God, to make our permanent home with God.

What would it really be like to make a home with the One who created the heavens and earth, who sustains the stars in their courses and who has remained faithful through every aimless human sojourn through deserts and exiles, whose love is powerful enough to become like us, and powerful enough to transform the worst we are capable of? To go to sleep at night, wake up each morning, eat, drink, go out and come back to a love that is the most real thing we could possibly experience? That sounds like a lot of work.

I—and I suspect, many of us—are more much like the Gentiles whom Paul and Barnabas were almost desperate to turn toward the living God. It is all too easy to substitute one relationship or another for the one that really matters. How frequently do we insist on the rulebooks of our preferred catechisms and rituals? How easy is it to distract ourselves with one idol or another? On top of that, the world we live in tends to forget the covenants made with our ancestors in faith; it habitually disdains the gifts of rain and harvest, nourishment and gladness that reveal a loving and generous Creator.

As the disciples protested some chapters earlier (John 6:60), today’s gospel is a hard saying and who can listen to it? Clearly, none of us can on our own. Instead, we rely on the gift and work of the Holy Spirit. As today’s gospel concludes, it is the Spirit, our Advocate, who is sent to remind us again and again and again of what Jesus taught—until we experience Jesus alive in us, leading us home to the One who sent him.
—BJ Brown

 Today’s readings can be found on the US Conference of Catholic Bishops website.