Letting Go of Jesus and Embracing the Holy Spirit

Homily for Wednesday of the 7th Week of Easter

Both readings for today follow hard on the heels of the readings from yesterday. We continue to listen to the farewell speeches of St. Paul and Jesus.

It is literally impossible for us to live with the same emotions that the disciples of Paul and Jesus must have felt at this particular juncture in their lives. Both speeches take place before Jesus and Paul die. However, the grief that is to come will be overwhelming for them.

Someone once characterized these scenes as similar to the memory he was carrying of the first time he rode his bicycle without the training wheels. I don’t know if you remember such a time in your life; however, I can say that my experience was but a fleeting moment of dread which evaporated almost instantaneously. Something tells me that what the disciples of Paul and Jesus were feeling was not resolved so quickly. To carry the metaphor further, the writer compared the struggle to balance a bicycle was akin to allowing the Holy Spirit to keep them from falling over in the face of their struggle to carry on after Paul and Jesus were no longer with them. Somehow it still seems a little shallow. However, I think there is one thing that I can take from this metaphor that does ring true; namely, the need to embrace the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives when we are faced with crises, remembering that the word “crisis” is the Greek word for “opportunity.”

As we complete the last few days of the Easter Season, we give thanks for this yearly, an opportunity for us to contemplate the salvific effects of Jesus’ death for us. We know that the Holy Spirit dwells within us and will guide us to a sense of balance in our life as we journey to join Jesus in heaven.

Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator