Monday in the Seventh Week of Easter, May 25, 2020, the Feast of St. Bede

John 16:29-33

The disciples said to Jesus, “Now you are talking plainly, and not in any figure of speech. Now we realize that you know everything and that you do not need to have anyone question you. Because of this we believe that you came from God.” Jesus answered them, “Do you believe now? Behold, the hour is coming and has arrived when each of you will be scattered to his own home and you will leave me alone. But I am not alone, because the Father is with me. I have told you this so that you might have peace in me. In the world you will have trouble, but take courage, I have conquered the world.”

The disciples said, “Now you are talking plainly.”  The Venerable Bede, whose feast is celebrated today, says in his commentary on the Gospel of John that what is happening here is not so much Jesus speaking more clearly, but that the Apostles are hearing more spiritually.  These are earthy men, not trained theologians, and they understand what they see and hear in their own way.  But Jesus is preparing them to become spiritual men, a work which the Holy Spirit will accomplish at Pentecost.  You and I became “spiritual” at the time of our baptism, and the work was “confirmed” when we received the Sacrament of Confirmation.  That is, we received the grace necessary to live and think spiritually, and now we can strive to grow spiritually.

It would pay us to read the words of Jesus in the Gospels while imagining what they would mean to an unlettered fisherman, or to a thoroughly secularized tax collector.  We ought to be amazed at the steadfast faith of his earliest followers, who gave up family, jobs, and worldly goods in order to sleep with Jesus in the open country, to walk with him across the rugged terrain of Galilee and Judea, to have little to eat and no certain prospects before them.  We should wonder what his hold on them consisted of.  We are given a clue to the power of this hold in St. John’s Gospel when John describes how Andrew and the “other disciple”, John, went to see Jesus, whom John the Baptist had pointed out.  John 1, 39 says that they went to the place where Jesus was staying, probably a crude lean-to, and “they stayed with him that day.”  The next morning, Andrew ran and brought his brother Simon to Jesus, telling him, “We have found the Messiah.”  What could Jesus have said to them that would have convinced Andrew of this?  Jesus would have explained what John the Baptist meant by calling him “the Lamb of God”, and what the Prophet Isaiah, particularly, had to say about the Messiah.  But it also seems that the spark of love was struck at that first meeting.  Jesus loved them beyond all telling and they could not help but feel it, feel drawn to it, and begin to respond to it.  

Three years after that first meeting, Jesus tells them that he is more than the Messiah of Israel, a fact they have grown to understand.  Here, he says, “I have conquered the world.”  That is to say, he has conquered it for them.  Now, because he has “conquered the world”,  he provides grace so that they can become spiritual men, they can see beyond the fleeting attractions and distractions of the present life, they can long for heaven with every hope of attaining it.  Filled with the same grace as they, so can we.

Saint Bede (672-735) lived in a monastery in northern England all his life.  He devoted himself to studying the Holy Scriptures and writing commentaries on them.  His work spread across the Christian world and influenced many scholars and theologians.  His Commentary on the Book of Revelation is, I think, the best of its kind, and in it he lays down the foundation upon which all later commentators on it are built.  Besides theological works, he wrote on the arts and sciences.  His most famous work is his “Ecclesiastical History of the English People”, widely available in modern editions.