Sunday, May 10, is the Sixth Sunday of Easter. Mass readings: Acts 8:5-8, 14-17; Psalm 66:1-3, 4-5, 6-7, 16, 20; 1 Peter 3:15-18; John 14:15-21.

In the Gospel, Jesus gives us three lessons on love meant to prepare us for the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. They also go a long way in describing the Christian life. Let’s take a look at the revolutionary life of love and grace that the Lord is offering us:

 “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. … Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me.”

Understanding this text from the standpoint of grace yields a proper understanding. Loving God is the gift of God. The text should be read to say, in effect, “If you love me, then by this love I have given you, you will keep my commandments.” As we grow in love for God, we are excited to please God. We keep his commandments not because we have to, but because we want to.

“And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot accept, because it neither sees nor knows him. But you know him, because he remains with you and will be in you.”

In this text, Jesus tells us that the power to change us is not an impersonal power like “The Force” in Star Wars. Rather, what changes us is not a “what” at all but a “Who.” The Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, living in us as in a temple, will change us and stir us to love. We love because he first loved us (1 John 4:10). God the Holy Spirit enables us to love God the Father and God the Son, and this love is the power that equips, empowers and enables us to keep God’s law. He, the Holy Spirit, is the One who enables us to love extravagantly.

“I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me, because I live and you will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father and you are in me and I in you.”

The key phrases here are “You will live” and “You will realize,” for the Lord says that he will not leave us as orphans but will remain with us.

We can say, “I am proof of God’s love and its power to transform; my life is proof! In the laboratory of my own life I have tested God’s word and his promises, and I can report to you that they are true. I have come to experience as real (i.e., ‘realized’) that Jesus lives, that through his Holy Spirit I have a power available to me to keep the commandments and to embrace the new life, the new creation they both describe and offer to me.”