Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year A (2026) - Fr Robert Krishna, OP

Jesus is going away. In today’s Gospel, he is going towards his death on the Cross. In the liturgical year, he is ascending back to heaven to take his seat at the Father’s right hand. Jesus says that he is going to send his disciples the Holy Spirit so as not to leave them orphans. But the Holy Spirit is not given instead of Jesus, a substitute to make up for his absence. Jesus himself will return to his disciples through the gift of the Holy Spirit. His disciples will know Jesus and continue to see him because they are transformed by the Holy Spirit into images of Jesus. We may even say that the Holy Spirit makes them, makes us, into Christs. Because the Holy Spirit enables us to love Christ, and to love Christ with the love of friendship, and a friend, as Aristotle says, is a second self. This is what Jesus means when he speaks of being in us and us in him. This is why he makes love a matter of obeying his commandments, not because love leads to a kind of slavery, but because friendship leads us to make our friend’s good will our own.

But as with any other friendship, it is not enough to put forth beautiful rhetoric about it. We need to grow in this friendship in the real world and live it through our actions. Peter, in his letter, speaks about reverencing the Lord Christ in our hearts, and having an answer for those who demand a reason for the hope we have. But first of all, we need to work at making Christ dwell in our hearts, grow in our own hope until people can see it in what we do. The first way we do it, the way we grow in any friendship, is to devote our time and to get to know God in study and prayer. The two of these go with each other. We need to learn about the Christ we worship. We need to read and pray with the Bible through which he speaks to us, learn the teachings of the Church, and become familiar with Jesus as our friend in the Eucharist, and through our personal prayer. This is not just something we do once, or something we can relax in having attained, at least not on this earth. Often the first demand for an account of our hope in Christ is made by our own hearts. Unless we are growing in our friendship with Christ, unless we are growing in our hope, we are going backwards. But friendship involves not just watching and getting to know our friends as spectators. It involves doing things for them and with them. Having become familiar with Christ, we constantly need to make Jesus’ will, his love, our own by prayer, and by listening to what the Church asks of us. And when we know it, we need to put it into action, sharing in our words and our works God’s love for everyone we meet. In this way, we invite others into the friendship we have ourselves entered, beginning with the people immediately around us, the people we live with and meet every day. We can go further: if we genuinely believe that friendship with Christ is the most profound thing in our life, that Christ himself desires the whole world to enter into that friendship, it cannot be a private personal relationship. We have an obligation to invite others into that friendship. Unless our friendship with Christ is shared with others, it is in danger of becoming cold and dying.

Of course, this will involve sharing Jesus’ Cross to which he is heading as he speaks the words of today’s Gospel. It will involve accepting suffering, often undeserved. It will involve sharing the slander and rejection to which Jesus himself is subject. But to the extent that we actually do this, Jesus has not left us. We can see him and know him, because we are living in him, and he in and through us.

Fr Robert Krishna, OP teaches Biblical Studies at Holy Name of Mary Seminary, Honiara, Solomon Islands and is currently assigned to St Laurence's Priory, North Adelaide, South Australia.