Meditation of His Beatitude Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year A

Below you can find the Meditation of His Beatitude Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year A, on Sunday 14 May 2023.

 Jn 14:15-21 

“If you love me” (Jn 14:15)

The Gospel passage of this Sixth Sunday of Easter opens with this affirmation (14:15-21).

The rest of the passage seems to depend on this initial hypothetical proposition, it all comes down to this, whether we love the Lord Jesus or not.

Loving Him is the fundamental premise, the door that opens to all the consequences that the successive verses describe. 

The first is that if we love Him, we keep His commandments.

This means that obedience to the Law, which was impossible for the person marked by sin, is now possible for redeemed humanity, for the one who lives in love. Man, alone, by his power, is incapable of obeying: the entire history of Israel is there to prove it, because sin corrodes trust, and therefore relationships. The one marked by sin asks a sign and puts the Lord to the test, and eventually obeys his fears, his will to save himself alone. For those who love, life is another thing, and a sign that one is in love is precisely obedience, that is, trusting the word of another, following it.

The second is that if we love Him, Jesus will pray to the Father, and the Father will give us another Paraclete, who remains with us always (Jn 14:16). Paraclete is a juridical term and refers to that figure who, in legal proceedings, stood next to the accused, and carried out his defense, against everyone. For those who love the Lord, there is, therefore, no longer condemnation of any kind. The accuser, indeed, according to John, is the devil, the one who puts our sin at the center, the one who treats us as sinners, as bankrupt. The Paraclete reminds us of what enables us to live, reminds us of the One who crossed over into death for our sins, the One who died to forgive us.

We are no longer only sinners, and we are no longer even orphans (Jn 14:18).

This is the third consequence that issues to those who love the Lord Jesus. We are people to whom the Lord continually returns, and returns in a new way, offering us His very life, His very relationship with the Father. 

This relationship between Jesus and the Father remains invisible for those who do not believe and for whoever does not love: Jesus says that His Passover will open a new time, in which the world will no longer see Him (Jn 14:19). Instead, believers will see Him in a new way, they will recognize in a new way, they will recognize that the Father is in Jesus and Jesus in the Father.

This will happen because the disciples will share the very life in which one lives in the other. After all, those who love, participate in this relationship, which is a relationship of love…

This Meditation was originally published on the website of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem. Please click here to read the full text.