Richard Mallory
“You Are Not Orphans” John 14:15-21 — Sixth Sunday of Easter
The setting matters. This is not a lecture hall or a synagogue. It is a table, the last one, and Jesus is speaking to people he has just called his friends—not servants, not students, but friends. Whatever we make of the theology in these verses, we should not let its density crowd out the tenderness underneath it.
He is leaving. They know it, even if they cannot quite hold it. And what he wants them to know, before he goes, is this: you will not be abandoned. He will not leave them orphaned in a world that has already demonstrated its hostility. He is sending another advocate—the paraclete—and the word is worth sitting with. Advocate. Defender. The one who stands beside you in court when the accusations start flying.
Because the accusations do fly. They flew at his followers then; they fly at us now—sometimes from outside, sometimes, most devastatingly, from within. Every person who has ever sat in a therapist’s office knows something about an inner voice that is less a conscience than a prosecutor-persecutor: relentless, inventive, never satisfied, always prepared to retry a case already decided. Freud called it the superego. Whatever we call it, it can make a life miserable. The old joke is that psychotherapists were called “shrinks” because the job was to shrink this inner critic down to a manageable size, to fire the hanging judge who has taken up residence in the chest.
The paraclete, I want to suggest, is doing something structurally similar—and far more radical. Jesus is not leaving his people to manage their inner critics alone, or to be devoured by a world that scapegoats what it cannot understand. He is sending the Spirit of truth into the very place where persecution—internal and external—does its worst work. And the Spirit’s word to the internalized prosecutor, to the community’s designated victim, to the marginalized person absorbing the world’s contempt, is something like: that verdict does not stand. You are known. You are loved. You belong to the one who belongs to God.
The command to love one another—twice stressed, not offered as a suggestion—is the shape this takes in community. It is not sentiment. It is a practice, a discipline, a daily refusal to let the world’s economy of accusation and exclusion govern the community’s life. Where love is the undergirding principle, Jesus says, that is where the three—Father, Son, Spirit—make their home. Not in correct doctrine alone, not in the right liturgy, but in the enacted, reenacted, stubbornly sustained practice of mutual care.
He is not abandoning them. The advocate is coming. The hanging judge is about to get a letter it did not expect.
Your fellow traveler,
—Richard