Making His way down to the Kedron Valley to the garden, Our Lord speaks more and more clearly, openly to His disciples. They are deeply agitated, they are afraid. They sense the impending evil. Already the Lord has spoken about them being scattered. The shepherd will be struck and the sheep will be scattered. He had spoken about the betrayal. He had spoken even to Peter, saying ‘Satan had got his wish to sift them like wheat.’ He gives them some consolation as He speaks with them, some encouragement. Even though at the same time, there minds are perhaps not all there, He is speaking of His departure, and of course that would cause them much grief. But He consoles them, when speaking of the advocate, ‘When the advocate comes whom I shall send to you from the Father.’ So He is the one who will send the advocate, yet He also speaks of the Father sending the advocate as well. For the Third Person, the Spirit of Truth who issues from the Father, this Third person is being sent into the world, not that He is not in the world, for the Blessed Trinity is always in the world. In fact He is everywhere, the Father is everywhere, the Son is everywhere, the Holy Spirit is everywhere. One God is everywhere. Yet the manner in which the Persons are present differs. The Son, the Second Person was sent meaning that He had taken a new way of existing in the world. That is He took flesh from the Virgin, and this is a new way in which God is present among us. The Holy Spirit likewise is sent and He is going take a new way of existence in our world. He will do this in two ways, interiorly and exteriorly… For Fr. Linus’ complete homily please listen to the Audio.

Our Lord had called Himself the vine and we the branches. He had in many ways told us that we can only have life as long as we remain united with Him. If we fail to remain united with Him, we will loose our life and we will not only not bear fruit but would also perish. He came into the world out of love for the world. That is the world that He created. He uses the word world in several senses, inasmuch as He has created it, it is good. But when sin entered into the world, it took possession of all those who submit to it. And so the Lord calls the world, those who are opposed to Him, to His plan of redemption, to His plan of giving life, all those whose character is such that they love the darkness. Basically those who love sin. Therefore in this sense the world opposes Him, and consequently the world opposes us, and so the Lord not hiding anything from us tells us, ‘If the world hates you, know that it hated Me before you’ In this way, He shows He is the standard barer, we are to follow Him. Yet at the same time He walks with us – where His very life oozes, pulses through us, inasmuch as He is the vine and we are the branches. So we should not expect to be treated any better than He… For Fr. Linus’ complete homily please listen to the Audio.

If we are to gain fruit from reading the scriptures, then we must do so prayerfully. We must find a quite place into which do so prayerfully. We must invoke the Holy Spirit and of course we must read the sacred scriptures, with devotion and attention. In the scriptures it is Christ Himself who speaks to us. And every word that He says is of importance. And therefore we should even pay attention to the words that He uses. For example in today’s Gospel He tells us, ‘If anyone loves me he will keep My word.’ He puts it in the singular, no divisions, no multiplications, just my word. And the reward He promises is, ‘My Father will love Him, and We shall come to Him, Father and Son and We will make Our home with him’. So in keeping Christ’s word undivided, whole and entire, we obtain the love of the Father Himself and we obtain the communication of Father and Son inasmuch as They come to us and we in Them. Or in other words we share in the divine nature.

What about those who do not love him, He says ‘Those who do not love Me, do not keep My words.’ He puts it in the plural. Because the first sign of a lack of love is to nit pick, to divide, to make distinctions, to drift away bit by bit. And this in fact is the sad experience of our first parents in the garden… For Fr. Linus’ complete homily please listen to the Audio.

Our Lord invites us to prayer. Prayer is the means by which we are in touch with the reality or to put it more clearly the truth. God is truth; God is the only reality that exists. We exist only because God has brought us into existence. He has not only destined us for this world, but our destiny lies in knowing Him face to face. Seeing Him as He is and being able to love Him in His essence.

How does this come about, it begins because the Son of God, entered into our world. Our Lord in the Gospel said to the disciples and of course to us that ‘You believe that I have come from God and that the Father has sent Me’ which is in fact a declaration of His divinity. I have come from God and this is what we profess in our creed, God from God, light from light, true God from true God. This is His internal generation within the blessed trinity. From all eternity the Father begets His Son, His Son is His own self knowledge. And this begetting of the Son, the perfect copy of His invisible image as St. Paul tells us that the Father loves, He loves the Son with an infinite love, the very love that is His being. And because the Son is the perfect image the Son loves the Father as Our Lord says elsewhere in St. Johns Gospel. And how does the Son love the Father, but in exactly the same manner that the Father loves the Son… For Fr. Linus’ complete homily please listen to the Audio.

Our Lord called Himself the true vine. The true vine that brings forward sweet fruity, the vine that brings forth the blood, that inebriates and gives eternal life. And this vine, also known as His mystical body, also known as the Church, includes each and every one of us. He has called us after all, the branches of this vine. And the fruit that comes from Him passes through us, or better still, we bear that fruit. When we think about it, the sap in the vine passes through the branches, the branches themselves do not produce the sap. And when we compare it to ourselves life comes through Him, He is life. We don’t have life of our own, but rather the life we have, the true life we have comes from Him. Equally the joy He spoke about is essentially His, and He shares it with us. So when He says, I am the true vine and the Father is the vine dresser, He is telling us that in His human nature He is the vine and we because of our human nature are grafted into Him. But the one who ensures that we remain in Him is none other than the Father who is the Lord of all and the source of every good. In this grafting He tells us that there are seven benefits that we receive because we are the branches… For Fr. Linus’ complete homily please listen to the Audio.

The Lord had gathered the disciples at the beginning of His ministry. He had chosen them, each one individually. This choice was of the divine will. Even Judas had been chosen. He had been chosen to do what was necessary. Likewise Peter was chosen. When Andrew brought his brother Peter to the Lord, saying we have found the Messiah, the One Moses had spoken about. He brought Peter to the Lord, the Lord looking at Peter, at least it was Simon as he was then, said ‘You are Simon, you are to be called Peter.’ So the Lord with His disciples spent some two years working miracles to prove the truth of what He taught. He encountered some opposition from the authorities, who refused to accept Him and more importantly to accept what He said. He pleaded with them ‘If you do not believe Me, at least accept what I say because of the signs.’

So the Lord decided the time had come now to choose the leader of the little band of the Apostles or more correctly to choose the rock on which to build His Church. So moving away from the centre of Judea into pagan or at least close to pagan territory, He asked the disciples, ‘Who do men say the son of man is?’ Our Lord had identified Himself as the son of man and He asked the question. The disciples had been with Him for a couple of years, they had heard Him, they had heard His teaching, they had seen the signs, the miracles. What’s the opinion of the crowd, who hadn’t seen everything He had done? The Apostles respond… For Fr. Linus’ complete homily please listen to the Audio.

Our Lord had said to the disciples, ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God still, and trust in me’, in this way declaring His equality with the Father. For, if we trust in God as He commands and also trust in Him with that same trust, then there must be equality. He’s given peace, He says, ‘My peace I bequeath to you, My own peace I give to you.’ His peace is that divine peace, that divine harmony that exists between Father, Son and Holy Spirit and this is what He confers to us. It is evident that we cannot give something we ourselves do not have. So if He gives it, we know that its source must be from the very bosom of the Holy Trinity. This peace became manifest first of all in the holy family on the night when He entered into our world. The angels descended from Heaven singing ‘Glory to God in the highest and peace to those of good will.’ So it’s this same peace from the blessed Trinity, through the holy family, in Himself that He confers on us. He makes it clear that it’s not the kind of peace that the world gives. The best the world can give us is tranquility, but not peace. It can give us a sense of safety, more by an absence of difficulties and of war. But it cannot give us this peace that our lord speaks of. A peace which begins with first and foremost a reconciliation with God. That means freedom from sin… For Fr. Linus’ complete homily please listen to the Audio.

Our Lord had used many images to describe Himself. In His relationship to us, He is the gate of the sheepfold, He is the good shepherd, He is the light that comes into the world, which dispels the darkness. He is the lamp, but here He calls Himself the true vine. The fact that He adds the adjective true, tells us that there is another vine. This other vine in fact Israel and about Israel the prophet complained, I planted a vine, instead of bearing fruit it bore sour grapes. But Our Lord is the true vine. He is the true vine in regard to His humanity. As Israel was to be the means by which God would redeem the world and failed, in as much as the Apostles said, our fathers were unable to observe the law. Our Lord who is the true vine obeyed His Father even unto death and therefore He is the true vine producing the fruit the Father wanted. So He is the true vine and at the same time, His Father, our Father is the vine dresser. So, in His humanity, He is the true vine, in His divinity He is the vine dresser… For Fr. Linus’ complete homily please listen to the Audio.

Our Lord gave the Apostles the same mission that He received from His Father. ‘As the Father has sent Me, so do I send you.’ Here in St. Marks Gospel He tells the eleven, go out into the whole world. Before they were only to go to the lost sheep of the house of Isreal, but now He has won salvation for all, He sends them to proclaim the good news to all creation. That commission given to the eleven is given to the Church. Given to the Church, it is given to each and every member of the Church of which we are individual cells and therefore we have that same commission to proclaim the good news.

One who hears and believes, receiving baptism is saved. So we are instruments in the salvation of others. For those who will not believe, the Lord gives a warning, condemnation. Charity demands that we desire and work for the salvation of all. Our Lord also tells us there are signs by which believers maybe seen, detected, and then indeed believe. One of the signs is found in St. Peters first letter but throughout the scriptures as well… For Fr. Linus’ complete homily please listen to the Audio.

Our Lord, as we just said, washed His disciple’s feet which had scandalised Peter. ‘Surely you’re not going to wash my feet?’ To which the Lord said ‘You do not know what I’m doing now, later you’ll understand.’ Peter said ‘You will never wash my feet.’ Our Lord said ‘If I do not wash your feet, you will have no part of me.’ The threat of being separated from Christ was so great that Peter said ‘Not only my feet, but my head and my hands as well.’ To which the Lord responded, ‘He who has washed, doesn’t need to be washed again except for his feet’, because our feet keep us in contact with this world. Our eyes, St. Paul tells us, should be in heaven where Christ is. So our hearts long to be where He is. As Peter was fearful of being separated from Him, so also we should be not fearful of being separated, as anxious to be joined to Him. But already we are joined to Him, we are disciples by His grace, we are His servants by His favour… For Fr. Linus’ complete homily please listen to the Audio.