Sixth Sunday of Easter, Cycle A. Today’s readings: Acts 8:5-8, 14-17; 1 Peter 3:15-18; John 14:15-21
Last week, the World Health Organisation declared that the COVID pandemic is finally over. While this is a reason to celebrate we must not forget the lessons learnt from this tribulating experience. Now that we have moved out of this phase, we can focus our energies and resources on other pandemics that are no less widespread and equally worrying.
One such pandemic is subtle and shrouded in taboo. A telephone survey carried out by the Faculty of Social Wellbeing last year revealed that 55 per cent of Maltese admitted to being affected by this condition. It is the pandemic of loneliness.
Irrespective of the country’s GDP, loneliness continues to plague many. Truth be told, even an active spiritual life is no guarantee of not being struck by this pandemic. Jesus’s words in today’s gospel, taken from his long farewell discourse at the Last Supper, in which he promises his disciples that he will not abandon them even after he is gone, offers a ray of hope.
In what would well sound like a prelude to the Ascension and Pentecost, Jesus makes a promise: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth, he remains with you, and will be in you.”
To be sure, the pandemic of loneliness cannot be healed through gadgets meant to enhance communication and ease boredom, just as the COVID pandemic, notwithstanding the importance of vaccines and ventilators, could not be solved just by these technological means. If anything, the pandemic was just a symptom that exposed a deeper underlying problem.
In the words of Pope Francis in Fratelli tutti, “the pain, uncertainty and fear, and the realisation of our own limitations brought on by the pandemic, have only made it all the more urgent that we rethink our styles of life, our relationships, the organisation of our societies and, above all, the meaning of our existence”.
The pandemic... made it all the more urgent that we rethink our styles of life, our relationships, the organisation of our societies and, above all, the meaning of our existence- Pope Francis in Fratelli tutti
In other words, the pandemic exposed, for instance, that richer nations cannot be concerned only with the well-being of their own people without being conscious also of how its political and economic decisions affect other less affluent countries, separated by swathes of land and ocean, yet intimately connected by a global economy.
When Jesus promised his disciples that he will be close to them even after his departure, he promised to be with us in a kind of active presence that restores world order corrupted by sin.
In her essay “The Spirit and the Nearness of God”, drawing on the work of Jürgen Moltmann, who described the Holy Spirit as the “unspeakable closeness of God”, theologian Colleen M. Griffith wrote of the localised and tangible dimension of the Holy Spirit, the “indwelling spirit”.
For Griffith, the Spirit promised by God “breathes, beckons, loves, and prays from an expansive place of abiding within whole communities and their members, and within the entire created order as well, inspiring a sense of kinship throughout, for the sake of a common good, that portends a coming reign.”
When Jesus promises that we will not be left alone he is not speaking of us having some kind of an imaginary friend, which would clearly put us on the level of the delusional. Neither does he want us to believe that we will not face periods of feeling abandoned, for even Jesus himself plunged into the depths of forsakenness on the cross.
What Jesus is promising is that our fragmented society, which is largely to blame for our loneliness, can be restored to wholeness through his uniting Spirit. Through the awareness of our common destiny, shared by the kinship of our common vulnerability, the throes of this modern-day pandemic can be overcome.