Wednesday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time

Since Easter Sunday the Church has presented us with many images and teaching passages from the Gospel of John. The “  Last  Discourse,” chapters 13 through 17, can be read as a kind of graduation valedictory speech; Jesus giving a pep-talk to those whom He has been schooling.

When Moses was preparing for his not passing with his people into the Promised Land, he wrote the Book of Deuteronomy. It is considered his “will”, but not of his material goods being distributed, but something more precious to him. The term for this passing on of an ethical or behavioral will or desire is known as “Zava’ah”. All the laws and traditions mentioned in this book contain all that Moses has heard from God as to how his people will become even more, the People of God.

In our Gospel Reading for today’s Eucharistic Liturgy, Jesus continues his Zavah’ah in which He is expressing His desire on just how His disciples will continue their becoming His brothers and sisters. As with Moses’ dying soon,  Jesus is leaving and as we have celebrated recently with Pentecost, yet still remaining. These chapters of the Final Discourse are deuteronomic, or full of God’s desire for the “little Church” to remain, strength and advance.

Jesus, in these few verses, mentions the word “world” ten times and in a tone of distaste or derision. It can sound like His disciples have to stay in the “world” and He’s not going to take them out of it. So what is this “world” to Jesus and His disciples? Moses was sending his people into a Promised Land, Jesus was commending His people to stay in the “world”  and form it into a new Land of Promise. They are in the “world,” but do not belong to it as Jesus does not belong to it.  

We receive these words of Jesus as He passes many images to us of who we really are. “Truth” seems to be the opposite of the “world”. The “truth” He offers each of the disciples and us as well is that we are who Jesus claims us to be. The “world” claims us to a mercurial or ambiguous. The identity of our self is centered in the “Truth” of Jesus. “I am what he was” as Hopkins writes. We are consecrated in that “Truth” and the world “hates” us because it remains frustrated that it cannot give us a floating or identity which needs to be renamed, reformed, refigured.

More clearly now, the “world” loves confusion and desires to pull us this way and push us that way, then up and now down. The “world” would invite us to obtain our name and fame which is here today and we wonder about tonight or who we will be tomorrow according to who the “World” thinks is really “something”, that’s it exactly! The “world” urges us to be a “something” a commodity a currency. The disciples, after the descent of the Holy Spirit, begin insulting the “world” just as Jesus did. He heard, received and lived His name, His identity and He rejected any temporary now-you-have-it, now-you-don’t name. The disciples are consecrated, made holy, by being in His name, His “Truth” and so are we.

Moses went into the Promised Land embedded in the speaches, laws and encouragements of his Zavah’ah, the pages of Deuteronomy. Jesus Zavah’ah, or will is incarnated in the lives of His disciples who we now are. The law and Spirit of Jesus is embedded in how we live as branches of His Vine, washers of feet, and insultors of the “world”. He did not take us out of the “world” but out of its ways.