Today's Gospel is taken from our Lord's Farewell Discourse in John 14.
Jesus says in verse 15, He says, If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
The big picture message here is that love and obedience go together.
The disciples' personal love for Jesus will lead them to obey His commandments.
Obedience is a fruit of love.
The word obey comes from the Latin prefix ob- and the verb audire, ob- is to, that's what it means, audire is listen or hear.
Obedience means to hear and to say yes to someone.
For example, in John 3, 36, we read, He who does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God rests upon him.
So you will keep my commandments means you will obey my commandments.
Again, love and obedience go together.
I suspect that's not preached so much in our culture today, but there are a few things which are really true that the culture preaches nowadays in general.
To love, and this is even more counter-cultural, to love is also to obey the church.
Our Lord says in Luke 10, verse 16 to the disciples, He says, He who hears you, hears me.
He who rejects you, rejects me.
He who rejects me, rejects him who sent me.
The Greek word used there for hear is akuo, it means both to hear and to obey, has the same meaning.
His obedience to Christ and to the church is a work of love, so too, disobedience to Christ and to His commandments and to the church, it's actually a work of hatred, not a work of love.
To disobey doesn't mean I wasn't aware of something or what someone said.
To disobey means yes, I hear what Christ and the church says, but I reject it, I refuse to listen.
Our Lord talks in the gospel about people who have ears, but they can't hear, it's the disobedient essentially that He's talking about.
For example, when Jesus speaks to the Jews, meaning the Jewish leaders, in John chapter 9, at one point, He says to them, if you were blind, you would have no sin, but now you are saying, we see, so your sin remains.
Verse 41, it's not that they were ignorant of the truth, it's that they refused to hear and to embrace it.
So to share in Christ's salvation and in His grace is to share in His obedience to the will of the Father, an obedience which undoes the disobedience and the hatred of sin.
External religiosity without internal conformity to Christ is essentially worthless.
As Jesus Himself tells the scribes and the Pharisees and the disciples a number of times in the gospels, Pharisees had beautiful external religious piety on the whole, they had a number of natural virtues too, but very often they lacked charity, mercy, humility, and a heart of obedience.
They had ears, but they couldn't hear the Son or the ones whom the Son commissioned and sent out to preach the gospel, to preach essentially the freedom which comes from obedience to God.
So just as the Son loves the Father and obeys His will, so too must the disciples love Jesus and obey His will, which is the same as the Father's will.
So if we love and obey Christ and His church, that's a sign that we're being guided by the Holy Spirit, who in the translation of today's lectionary is called the Advocate.
If you love me, you will keep my commandments and I will ask the Father and He will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of Truth, John 14 verses 15-17.
The Greek word that's used there for the Holy Spirit is Parakletos, it's translated as Advocate or Counselor, Helper, Comforter, or as the Paraclete in some translations.
Jesus says that the Father will give us another Advocate, meaning that we already have one.
First John 2 verse 1, we read, if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous.
So Jesus is our first Advocate, the Holy Spirit is our second Advocate, Our Lady is essentially the third Advocate too, right?
And they all work together, so you can't go around one or ignore one to try to get to another one to get a different answer.
No, spiritually they work together, spiritually to be on the right path you have to listen to all of them.
In the ancient world, a Parakletos was someone who in a court of law could provide assistance and help to a person in a trial setting, they would accompany their client, they would console them, give them counsel, plead the person's cause, intercede with the judge and protect and defend them as best as they could.
These are all activities that apply to the Holy Spirit too.
After Jesus' ascension to the Father, He doesn't leave His children orphans as we hear in the Gospel, but He sends them an invisible help and guide who is the Holy Spirit, who does all the things that our Lord did in His public life for His disciples.
So it's now the role of the Holy Spirit to guide and protect and vivify the church.
For there are, says Paul VI of the Second Vatican Council, there are two factors which Christ has promised and arranged in different ways to continue His mission, meaning the apostolate and the Spirit.
The apostolate is the external and objective factor, it forms the material body, so to speak, of the church and is the source of her visible and social structures.
The Holy Spirit acts internally within each person as well as on the whole community, animating, vivifying and sanctifying it.
Says Pope St. Paul VI.
So our three advocates, essentially Jesus, the Holy Spirit, Our Lady, those three advocates won't fail us if we don't fail them, if we remain humble and faithful to the love who humbly and cheerfully laid down His life for us on Good Friday.
Let's ask Our Lady, the Advocate, who is the closest to us in many ways, let's ask Her for the grace to embrace the freedom that comes from fidelity to Her Son and to His church.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Amen.