Acts 17: 22-31; John 14: 15-21

Our gospel reading today was from John’s gospel, as it was last week. John’s gospel is so full of memorable sayings of Jesus. But if I was to ask you to pick out three passages from John’s gospel that summarise the good news we have through Jesus, I wonder which ones you would choose.

For me there is no doubt about it.

God so loved the world that he gave us his only Son.

And so the Word became flesh and lived among us and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son.

But when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.

Those three verses seem to me to encapsulate the good news that we have in Jesus Christ.

And the thread running through them is the golden thread of God’s love – God’s love for his Son and God’s love for us; and the Son’s love for his Father and also for us.

And that is the very heart of what we are about as we come together as part of God’s worldwide church this morning. We are here because in some way and to some extent we have been captivated by the unconditional love of God, who has accepted us into his kingdom just as we are. With all our blemishes and failings, let alone the hurts and harms we have done to others, he accepts us into his family. And he assures us that nothing can separate us from that love, which will go on for ever and ever, world without end. And having been found by that kind of love, we now live together in the context of that love.

Just as God is three persons who from before eternity have been involved in a dance of love, so we are now called to enjoy and to join in their love. And when that happens our lives are changed and cannot be the same as they were before.

In his farewell discourse, which our gospel reading is taken from, Jesus links living in that love with obeying his commandment. And what is that commandment?  Well, he has just told them – it is that they are to love one another.

Jesus has spent three years with this group of followers – the 12 disciples, along with many others who followed him closely. In that time, he had explained to them in many ways how God’s kingdom is different from the kingdoms of the world around them – both the religious and the political kingdoms – it is about service not power. He not only spoke about God’s love for all manner of people, but he himself regularly interacted with those who were marginalised, or excluded – Gentiles, women, lepers, tax collectors, prostitutes, and we could go on.

Of course, this was not new. There was much in their scriptures about God caring for the widows, the orphans and the refugees. But as with most societies, then as now, it is power that rules, and those in power who set the rules.

Now, knowing that very soon he will be taken and crucified, that he will rise again, and shortly thereafter return to the Father, he wants his disciples to understand how they are to go on without his physical presence among them.

And so, he focuses on showing and explaining to them how they are to live. In the previous chapter (chapter 13) we read how he took a towel and a basin and washed the feet of the twelve. And then he told them that that was what they were to do also. He then said that he was going to lay his life down for them, and he was giving them a new commandment to love one another, in just the same way as he had loved them.

So, with the washing of feet and the laying down of life, he had shown love, and now they too were to live in and to show that love.

But how were they to do it without him? We know how often they had got things wrong and needed correction, so what would happen when he was not there to lead and to correct?

What he promised in the passage that have just read was that he would not leave them as orphans. An orphan is someone without parents, without support, without guidance, alone in the world. Jesus said he was not going to leave them like that, but he would ask the Father to give them another paraclete, who would be with them for ever.

Some of you will know of the community of religious sisters based at Whitby. Their order is known as the Order of the Holy Paraclete, not to be confused as is sometime said “the holy parakeet”. The literal translation of paraclete is “one called alongside”.

Our NRSV translates the word paraclete as advocate. Other versions historically and now use the word counsellor, or helper, or comforter, using the word comfort in its older sense of strengthening rather than soothing. But they all have in common someone who comes alongside another to help them.

By “another” paraclete, Jesus means “another like me”. “Another” one who will do what I have been doing.

Jesus came alongside us so that we might see and get to know the otherwise invisible God. The one whom Paul had described in Athens as “the unknown god”. Jesus taught his disciples the truth; He showed them how to live; He corrected them when they were going wrong. That was what happened when the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.

And that is what another paraclete will now do.

I personally like the word advocate, which many of you won’t find surprising as you know that I was for many years a barrister. And I was very fortunate in that for a long time I worked regularly here in York at the Crown Court. Things were done very differently in the 1980s. So, a typical day would begin by having a full English breakfast with colleagues in Fenwicks. Then we would go across to the Court, robe up and more often than not I would go down into the cells to meet my lay client. There I would literally get alongside them, sitting down on the cell bench next to them and listening to them as they told me their story. It was then my job to speak for them.  I was their advocate. But I could only fulfil that role by really getting alongside, listening, understanding and then interpreting them.

Jesus tells the disciples that the Holy Spirit is already alongside them, but he says something more is going to happen – the Spirit is going to live within them, to indwell them. There is a great deal in chapters 14 and 15 about the Father, the Son, the Spirit and us, and talk of who lives in whom, which I find far from easy to follow and grasp. But for me the bottom line is that it is all about the love of God which has found us and within which we now live.

And that Spirit is with each of us day by day in the same way that Jesus was with his disciples, to demonstrate, to teach, to train, and to correct. We now have the Spirit doing all that. Putting a finger on what needs to change, enabling us to produce good fruit, strengthening us to speak and live to God’s glory – that is what the Spirit does. Do you want to see the Spirit at work in your life? Then look inside – that’s where you will find God’s Spirit at work. Any sense you have of what God is saying and doing is simply the promised paraclete doing his job.

And the marker of authenticity we look for is anything and everything to do with love.

One of the sisters of the OHP – the late sister Marion Eva – used to say that when we are called to give an account of ourselves on the last day the question will not be “How much did you do for the kingdom?” But “how have you loved?”

Amen.