Today’s readings: Acts 6, 1-7; 1 Peter 2, 4-9; John 14, 1-12.
The Scriptures today narrate how in the aftermath of the resurrection, enthusiasm can easily wane. This fifth week after Easter marks metaphorically how we distance ourselves from what originally inspires strong faith in us. The Church narrated in Acts was at a crossroad and needed refocussing. John’s gospel reports with hindsight how the disciples felt themselves lost with heavy questions regarding Jesus’ identity and their future. They needed reassurance.
Peter, in his first letter, speaks of the stone rejected by the builders which effectively has become the keystone. As builders of society, of our Christian communities, of civilisation and of our personal lives, we can so easily mistake false foundations for solid rock.
What are we building and banking on? The ‘Pantocrator’ of the Byzantine mosaics and the embellished crucifixes hanging on the walls of our offices and buildings can easily be representations of a culture and yet miss the crucial point that the one represented had been effectively rejected.
We are all to some extent by-products of an intellectualistic faith-formation. This may put us all on Philip’s wavelength in today’s gospel. On the one hand, Jesus is saying “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” while, on the other hand, Philip is asking him to show them the Father and that would have been enough. When it comes to existential sense, when fear enters and our hearts are troubled, a conceptual faith provides no answers, let alone reassurance.
It is the reassurance of things believed and hoped for that many a time we crave for when the air is misty and the mind and heart find nothing to grip on to. Peter, in the second reading, puts trust in perspective and exhorts those he is addressing to “set yourselves close to him so that you too may be living stones making a spiritual house”. Very significant words indeed that speak loudly to us today.
When we lack vision we are doomed. This applies across the board to politics, to Church life, to any association we belong to, and even to our personal life. We always need a sense of direction. We always need to be with our eyes wide open as regards the foundations on which we build, be it the way society is organised or ecclesial life or the daily choices that shape our lives.
When the disciples were troubled and shaky, Jesus sought to provide them with a compass, not to lose heart and direction. The mist of doubt is not always easily dispelled through rational argument. There is the emotional doubt, the instability that comes from a troubled heart, from a profound loss that makes us question our own roots and substance.
Jesus, in such circumstances, can be as enigmatic as can be. This was actually what provoked Philip’s reaction in today’s gospel. Our belief, however deep it is, is never a handbook that answers all questions. Jesus points mainly to himself, not to something he had taught them. But the experience of him is never clear-cut or lasting.
We capture glimpses of the meaning of what he whispers in our ears, and very often, the moment we grasp something it can be already gone. His words “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” are a clear indication that actually it takes a lifetime for us to struggle out of the shadowlands into the light.