Monday of the Seventh Week of Easter
Today’s Gospel invites us to take courage because Jesus is triumphing, bringing good out of evil, victory out of defeat, hope out of despair. You see Easter wasn’t a single event but a reality lasting until the end of time and into eternity.
We know that the apostles left the Upper Room the first Holy Thursday night and weren’t courageous. Rather than remaining in his peace, as he invites them to, they scatter. They weren’t focused on Jesus’ conquering the world, as he tells them in this long Johannine discourse, but on how the world seemed to be conquering them. But according to John, 53 days later they would leave that same Upper Room and fearlessly proclaim Jesus as LORD on Pentecost.
The change happened through the gift our blessed LORD promised that the Father would send them, the gift of the Holy Spirit. One of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit is the gift of courage, which helps us to remain faithful when fearful, which strengthens us to do what God is asking of us despite our natural human revulsion of suffering and pain.
We pray in the Veni Creator Spiritus that we sing throughout, “Virtute firmans perpeti” (“strengthen us with your perpetual power”), and that’s precisely what the Holy Spirit seeks to do in us. To fill us with the courage we need to believe and to live by that belief on sunny days and stormy days.
Or are we convinced, as the Twelve were, that the reality of the world is conquering us and there’s little we can do about it. In that case…
Veni Creator Spiritus!
—Timothy J. Cronin