Anxiety
Acts 6:1-7; Ps 33:1-2, 4-5, 18-19; 1 Pt 2:4-9; Jn 14:1-12
The motif of a dying and rising god is prevalent throughout the world’s mythologies. Examples are Tammuz (Mesopotamia) and Persephone (Greece), gods whose life and death reflect the cycles of the seasons. You can read more about the “dying god motif” in Joseph Campbell’s classic, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.”
A critical question posed by the death of a god is: “What will the future bring?” If the god played an important role in society, then what happens when he is gone? Will the crops return in the spring or will there be chaos?
It is natural to expect anxiety in the face of such loss. And even if there is an expectation that the god will return, that is only a prediction. What if next time he fails to appear?
The death and resurrection of Jesus is obviously completely different from the ancient myths, but in today’s Gospel we find some of the same anxiety in the hearts of Jesus’ disciples when faced with his impending departure.
Although Jesus tells them that he will return and take them with him (Jn 14:3), Thomas likely voices a concern shared by all when he nervously blurts out that — despite Jesus’ claim to the contrary — they do not know where he is going. One can almost hear an implied question underlying the voiced one: “Jesus, why do you have to leave at all? Things are just fine the way they are!”
Yet Jesus insists that he must leave. Later in the same dialogue he acknowledges that his announcement of his departure is difficult for them: “Because I told you this, grief has filled your hearts. But I tell you the truth, it is better for you that I go. For if I do not go, the Advocate [i.e., the Holy Spirit] will not come to you” (Jn 16:6-7).
The obvious question is: Why does it have to be this way? Perhaps here Jesus’ lesson for the disciples has something in common with the ancient myths.
The myths of the deaths of the fertility gods dealt with an unavoidable fact of the natural world: seasons come and go. If an agrarian society is going to survive the trauma of watching its crops die in autumn, it will require trust in an uncertain future. The old myths were a way of establishing that trust, because it was grounded in the promise of the gods themselves.
Jesus didn’t have to leave the disciples. Presumably, he could have remained with them after the resurrection. As each generation of Christians came and went Jesus would remain on the earth, a comfortable companion always at hand.
But if that were the case, and human nature being what it is, I can imagine that we would begin to take Jesus’ Paschal Mystery (his life, death and resurrection) for granted. We would forget the extraordinary gift that the Incarnation was to us. We would become complacent in assuming that, regardless of how far we strayed from him, Jesus would always be near for an easy fix.
In short, we might imagine that we could relate to Jesus as intimately as Peter did, without having to traverse the long, and sometimes painful journey that he walked.
The fact that we no longer have Jesus of Nazareth in our midst but instead have his Spirit calls for a radical trust on our part. Furthermore, it presents the opportunity to foster gratitude for the grace he imparted to us during his time on earth (which is powerfully captured and conveyed in the Gospels). Trust and gratitude form the foundation of mature love.
Take time this week to reflect on some of the more poignant “goodbyes” you have experienced over the course of your life. There can be a tendency to see them as pure loss and a doorway to despair. But they may actually provide opportunities for a renewed appreciation of how those relationships taught you to both give and receive love more authentically. By pondering Jesus’ departure and the arrival of his Spirit we can find a renewed hope in the eternal, consoling presence of God’s love, even as we experience the vagaries of our human loves, which ebb and flow.