‘I shall not call you servants any more...I call you friends’. These wonderful words are a great consolation to us in this life, which can be so full of difficulties and discouragements. According to St John, at the Last Supper Our Lord spoke at great length, instructing the Apostles about the full depth of meaning of the Sacrament of His Body and Blood that He was giving them, and of the Sacrifice He was about to offer the very next day on the cross. Yet I think we can also see that St John also had in mind another body of instruction, that which St Luke refers to in the opening words of the Acts of the Apostles, which we will hear at Mass on Ascension Thursday this coming week. There Luke tells us that our Lord spent forty days from the day of His resurrection until His glorious return to the Father, continuing to appear to the Apostles and telling them about the kingdom of God.
These two instructions, the first at the Last Supper and the other during the Forty Days after the Resurrection really do belong together. Undoubtedly our Lord will have given the Apostles much of the same teaching both before His Passion, and after His resurrection. Both are the consummation of His entire life and ministry, and explain the gift of Himself to the Apostles. When you listen to our Lord’s teaching at the Last Supper, it may at first seem almost hypnotically repetitive. I mean that, so very often throughout the Last Supper, our Lord seems to be saying the same thing over again, sometimes with very slightly different words, as though He is looking at something from as many different angles as possible to give a full account of its riches.
It is in these chapters, for instance, that we learn most of the forthcoming gift and mission of the Holy Spirit, who has been mentioned from time to time during our Lord’s ministry, but never in such depth as now. It is from this teaching that we learn that the Holy Spirit is about to come down on the Apostles to form the living Body of Christ from a mere handful of individuals. It is then that the Spirit will become the source of our joy, and source of the power of the Church’s Sacraments which transform us into the likeness of Christ our Lord. In this way the Spirit will make Christ known to us by bringing Him to dwell within us, by filling us with the unquenchable joy of loving the God who has made known His love to us. That great gift we shall celebrate with great joy and solemnity in two weeks’ time at Pentecost, when the Easter season comes to its triumphant end.
That is why our Lord said that the Holy Spirit would remind the Apostles of all that He, the Christ, had taught them, and furthermore, lead them into all truth. We are the heirs of that gift of the Spirit. He is the One who inspires us with living knowledge of the love of God and fills us with joy. He is the One who brings about the unity of the Church – and I don’t mean some figurative, metaphorical unity, but the real living bond of love in the Body of Christ who, as St Paul found out, makes us cry out in joy: ‘Abba, Father!’ This is the joyous spring from which flowed our introit this morning: ‘Proclaim a joyful sound, and let it be heard! Proclaim [it] to the ends of the earth.’ The ends of the earth ring out to the same song of joy, because the ends of the earth are filled with those in whom one and the same Spirit makes His home and unites us in the one Body of Christ.
And what is the truth into which Christ says the Spirit will lead us? It is the knowledge that Christ no longer calls us servants but friends, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Up until the Holy Spirit’s coming upon them, the Apostles cannot have known the inner secrets of the Son of God. Nor can we, by human means alone. The Apostles and we have nevertheless been given this wonderful knowledge by the Holy Spirit. He is the one who makes known to us everything that the Father has taught His Son, and He does this by living in our hearts, and so making us sharers in God’s own friendship which is His inner life of love. Hence our Lord’s words: ‘I shall not call you servants any more, I call you friends.’
Now I just want to invite you to think for a moment how truly amazing it is that God the Holy Spirit dwells in us in order to make us God’s friends, and not merely His servants. We tend either to take it for granted or to treat it as something too obscure to understand. Yet once we begin to dwell on that striking fact, then our Lord’s command to love one another as He has loved us makes more sense. How can we possibly love anyone as God loves us? By unaided human nature this is impossible, but not with God living in us and sharing His inner love with us. This is what Christ has made possible by His death, resurrection and gift of the Holy Spirit. This is why He freely laid down His life for us: ‘A man can have no greater love,’ He says, ‘than to lay down his life for His friends.’
As I say, so much of what Our Lord says at the Last Supper seems at first merely repetitive. Yet to stop at just thinking that would be to miss the real heart of what He is saying to us. At the opening of the Gospel we have just heard, He says ‘As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Remain in my love.’ ‘Remain’, or to choose a similar word ‘abide’, are words describing a constant state of being, and means sharing life together. Our Lord uses this word constantly as He addresses the Apostles at the Last Supper: ‘if you remain in me, then I will remain in you’, and as we heard in last Sunday’s Gospel: ‘As a branch cannot bear fruit all by itself but must remain part of the vine, neither can you unless you remain in me.’ And He puts this yet another way when He says: ‘make your home in me as I make mine in you’. It is when we do this, all through the indwelling, which is the remaining or abiding in us of the Holy Spirit, that we can do what Our Lord commands: ‘love one another, as I have loved you,’ and ‘I commissioned you to go out and to bear fruit, fruit that will last.’ We can express our Lord’s words in another way as: ‘go out and bear fruit, fruit that will remain.’
To love one another as Christ has loved us, that is the fruit of the Holy Spirit’s living in our hearts. He it is who enables us to make our home in Christ, and Christ to make His home in us. Now when we receive Christ into us bodily in Holy Communion, His sacramental presence remains for a short time only. That is why we can receive Communion every day if we so wish. But the Holy Spirit can make Christ’s remaining in us to be continuous, constant, when He brings the Father living in the Son and the Son living in the Father to dwell in our hearts. The Holy Spirit enables us to bear fruit, the fruit of loving one another as Christ loves us; such fruit will last into eternity. Now there’s something genuinely to make us cry out with joy, and proclaim a joyful sound to the ends of the earth, Alleluia!
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