• Acts of the Apostles 17: 22-31

Religions played many roles in the ancient world: personal comfort, public ceremony, social cohesion, national identity and philosophical inquiry. Luke presents an encounter by Paul with philosophers in Athens.  Paul starts with a deist argument, with which any religious person of that day might sympathize.  But, then he proclaims that all past religious inquiry culminates in the one God, who “has given assurance to all by raising him [Jesus] from the dead.”

• Psalm 66: 7-18

The psalmist recounts past ordeals, which can be regarded as tests by God.  Then switching to the first person singular, he testifies to “what God has done for me.”

• I Peter 3: 13-22

The writer of I Peter moves with agility between very practical instructions about conduct for early believers and grand, cosmic claims.  God brought Noah safely through the flood which destroyed the whole world, so, likewise, we come through baptism into a safe place.  Our status is established because Jesus Christ was raised from the dead by God and now reigns in heaven.

• John 14: 15-21

Jesus promises that he “will ask the Father” to give his followers– bound to him in love and obedience– “another Advocate,”  “the Spirit of truth….”  The “world” will not know or even recognize this “Spirit.”  The departure of Jesus, although necessary, will not leave his followers “orphaned.”  They will “see” him.  Then, “that day,” everything will fall into place: “You will know that I am in the Father, and you in me, and I in you.”  John’s text returns to the qualifier with which he began this section: “They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me, and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”

Recall that the occasion for this excerpt from John’s gospel is the last sustained conversation Jesus had with his followers just hours before he was arrested, tortured and executed, and just hours before the first rumors of resurrection begin.  It is in this conversation that Jesus issues what John calls a “new commandment”– “that you love one another.”  The impact of these words of Jesus has been dramatically heightened by his washing the feet of his followers, including the one who will betray him, and the other one who will deny him.  Jesus now turns to what will happen when he is gone.  They will “see” him; those who love him “will be loved by my Father;”  and, he will continue to “reveal” himself to those who love him.  They will now, finally, get the whole picture: he is “in the Father, and you in me and I in you.”  And the guarantor of these promises is assured in the promise by Jesus of “another Advocate,”  “the Spirit of truth,” who will be recognized only by those who are in this circle of  Love.  Jesus, who has given so much, indeed his all, now gives another gift that keeps the giving going.

Jean-Luc Marion writes in Prolegomena to Charity of the dynamic that Jesus sets in motion with all this gift-giving and his own intimacy with the Father’s gift-giving this way:

“The presence of Christ, and therefore also that of the Father, discloses itself by a gift: it can therefore only be recognized by a blessing.”  “A presence, which gives itself by grace and identifies itself with this gift, can therefore be seen only in being received, and be received only in being blessed.” (p. 129)

St. Thomas Aquinas wrote about this excessive, never-ending gift-giving, and how it is perpetuated, in his Summa Theologica (1a.38.2) :

“A gift if freely given, and expects no return.  Its reason is love.  What is first given is love; that is the first gift.  The Holy Ghost comes forth as the substance of love and Gift is his [sic] proper name.”

The life and ministry of Jesus, culminating in that final  Thursday, Friday, Saturday and the rumors that started Sunday morning, is the gift of Love par excellence!  It is the down-payment on a promise: those who respond to this extravagant gift of Love will find themselves in a new economy of love.  They will come to “see” it, although those outside its circle will not see it.  They will recognize this gift and themselves as beneficiaries, i.e.  as “blessed.”  This new status/identity (bestowed freely at baptism)  will be supported and strengthened by a “Spirit” that is itself another iteration of God’s extravagant, excessive, ‘irrational’ gift-giving.  It can “be seen only in being received….”    This is a new proclamation about the nature of  divinity, which would have baffled Paul’s listeners in Athens.