Saturday of the Fifth Week of Easter
In today’s Gospel, Jesus employs the image of “the world.” This “world,” as Jesus portrays it, is hostile to him and to the disciples: the world hates Jesus and persecutes him, and because the disciples are chosen “out of the world,” the world will hate and persecute them as well. All this, Jesus says, is because “they do not know the one who sent me,” that is, the Father.
Despite the constellation of negative statements about “the world” here in Jesus’s speech to his disciples, this “world” is also the world that “God so loved … that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” God sent his Son “not … to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” The world, then, is fundamentally ambivalent: it can be hostile and resistant to God, and yet at the same time it is beloved by God, wrapped wholly in his redeeming and saving will.
This ambivalence of the world, its fickleness and its belovedness, is fundamentally a reflection of the human heart. Both your heart and mine are capable of hostility and resistance to God, and yet God desires to wrap our hearts completely within his loving, redeeming will. Today, let us each reflect on the world of our heart, asking that God’s gracious, saving will overcome more and more the fickleness and resistance that may dwell there.