Homily for Sixth week of Easter: Gifts of the Holy Spirit and Peace

Good morning.  I hope you are all still experiencing the joy of the Easter season, rejoicing in the Risen Lord.  These past few weeks I’ve had the joy of assisting at the Easter Vigil and Confirmation Liturgies where many of our parish members have received the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation.   I see many of our parish member who have received these sacraments seated among you and they all look like they are filled with the joy of the Holy Spirit.

In today’s Gospel we hear about how to love Jesus: by keeping His word.  Jesus tells us that if we love him  “my Father will love us” and “we will come to him and make our dwelling with us”.    How incredible is that, God dwelling in us!   If we love God we get a foretaste of heaven by dwelling with God.


So how do we keep His word? Probably the first thing that comes to mind in keeping God’s word is following the Ten Commandments.  When we think of these what usually comes to mind, “Thou Shall” and “Thou Shall not”.  When we hear this what is our human nature? We want to challenge the rules, so if it’s “thou shall not” we are thinking thou shall! Many of us view Ten Commandments as a set of rules we are obligated to follow. 

Jesus invites us to do the same but says it another way:  Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.   He gives us the beatitudes as the way we show our love.  A few of them are:

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you

and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

Rejoice and be glad,

for your reward is great in heaven.

So how do we do this, keep His word?   We need turn our minds from looking at the commandments as rules that we have to follow out of obligation to generous actions we do because of our love for Jesus. St. Basil says it well:

If we turn away from evil out of fear of punishment, we are in the position of slaves. If we pursue the enticement of wages,... we resemble mercenaries. Finally if we obey for the sake of the good itself and out of love for him who commands... we are in the position of children.

So if we think of ourselves as children of the Father, we are going to keep His word out of our love for him as a loving parent.

Keeping the word of God can be hard to do on our own, but Jesus tells us today that we are given two gifts to help us: the Holy Spirit and His peace.   Jesus tells us that, “the Father will send the Holy Spirit in His name who will teach us and remind us of all he has told us”.   Jesus

also gives us his peace, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.  Not as the world give do I give it to you”.  The peace is not worldly peace through the absence or war, violence, or trouble brought about through military might or government action.   Jesus’ peace comes through the hope of salvation and that He is with us through our trials.  It does not mean our life will be without troubles.  We can see by the witness of Saints, many of who are martyrs (St. Peter and Paul for instance), that these followers of Christ still suffered trials.  But they did so through the hope of salvation and being with Christ in eternal glory.

Since we are also given the gift of the Holy Spirit I’d like share with you some ways it helps us.

The gifts of the Holy Spirit help to make the best of the virtues of those who receive them. Virtues are habits and personal tendencies that lead us to act in a good manner and give our best effort.

I’ve brought some packages as examples of each of the gifts. Would any one like to help me showing off these gifts?  Each one of these packages contains a gift of the Holy Spirit and the fruits produced by these gifts.

The seven gifts of the Holy Spirit are wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord.  These gifts help the faithful to cooperate with the will of God.

The fruits of the Spirit are ways that the Holy Spirit helps to keep God's word.  As I said earlier we need this help as we cannot do this alone. The tradition of the Church lists twelve fruits of the Spirit: charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control, and chastity.   These are ways of acting that will lead us to love God and neighbor.

After the Easter Season is over we have a tendency to take the Holy Spirit and forget about it.  The Holy Spirit gives us the power to teach and remind us of God’s word.  The one thing we can do is to call on the Holy Spirit through short prayer that we can all easily pray, “Come Holy Spirit”.   Fr. Anto preached about this last week at daily Mass that it was a prayer that was taught to Blessed John Paul II by his Father.  This is a prayer that I pray quite often, especially before proclaiming the Gospel and preaching.   I also use it in helping to guide me throughout the day, especially when I’m in challenging situation or searching for the right thing to do.  I hope you’ll pray it as well to call on the Holy Spirit.

I’d like to close with something from Archbishop Tobin’s homily at Confirmation last week.  He asked: have ever seen the wind?   The answer was you can’t see the wind, but you can see what it does.   The same goes for the Holy Spirit.  You can’t see it, it’s inside of you; but you can see the effects of the Spirit by the good works that you do.   May the Holy Spirit and the peace of Christ animate you to love God and neighbor so God may dwell in each and every one of you!

Note 1: Pictures in this blog are from photobucket.com