Jesus makes a beautiful promise in today’s Gospel:
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 14:15)
The promise is conditional—if you love me—then Jesus will ask the Father to send us the Holy Spirit. For today’s world, it is a shock to hear such a promise is conditional since we have the impression that many think nowadays they have a right to everything no matter what. God does love us unconditionally. It was his unconditional love that created us but if we love God back, we will receive Jesus’ promises in today’s Gospel. A few verses after today’s Gospel excerpt, there is another similar promise by Jesus, also conditional:
Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him. (John 14:23, literally in John’s Greek, “If anyone love me, he will keep my word.”
In the last book of the New Testament, Revelation or Apocalypse, there is another conditional promise by Jesus:
I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will enter his house and dine with him, and he with me. (Rev 3:20)
In today’s world, I think we have overlooked or forgotten the small word “if” attached to those promises: If we love Jesus and keep his commandments, if we keep his word, and if we open the door to him, then God will dwell in us.
The promise is supernatural, that God will dwell in us if we love God and keep his word. We call this the indwelling of God in us grace. We can pinpoint the exact moment when this grace of God entered us—when we were baptized. Again and again in today’s Gospel, Jesus promises this indwelling of God in us:
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I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth.
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You know him because he remains with you and will be in you.
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You will realize that I am in my Father and you are in me and I in you.
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Whoever loves me will be loved by my Father and I will love him and reveal myself to him.
While these promises were for the apostles to receive the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, there is a sense in which they are beyond time and are for all of us. We received the Holy Spirit first in baptism making us adopted children of God and we received the Holy Spirit again in Confirmation to enable us to witness to God and defend the faith.
From the time we were baptized, God’s Spirit is present in us and will remain alive in us if we continue to love God, keep his commandments, and open the door to him. That is our dignity. St. John Henry Newman describes beautifully the enormous dignity of this indwelling of God in us:
This wonderful change from darkness to light, through the entrance of the Spirit into the soul, is called Regeneration, or the New Birth; a blessing which, before Christ’s coming, not even Prophets and righteous men possessed, but which is now conveyed to all men freely through the Sacrament of Baptism. (Parochial and Plain Sermons Book 2, 19)
So, St. John Henry Newman says not even the prophets or holy people of the Old Covenant possessed the grace of the indwelling of God’s Spirit in them. The Catechism says, “The grace of Christ is the gratuitous gift that God makes to us of his own life, infused by the Holy Spirit into our soul to heal it of sin and to sanctify it.” (Catechism 1999) A beautiful description—a gift of God’s own life to us, to heal us of sin, and sanctify us.
God’s love for us is unconditional and his love created us but Jesus’ promise the Spirit indwelling in us in today’s Gospel is conditional; sometimes people do not live up to their dignity and stifle the presence of God in themselves, but the Sacrament of Reconciliation restores us once again to the dignity God intends for us. Every couple of years someone who is worried about something asks me if they might be possessed. They were not. Instead, we should think of ourselves as possessed by God since baptism! We can let that grace of the indwelling of God in us fade and wither by not coming to Mass or praying or receiving the sacraments and by wandering into sin. We can restore that grace in us once again in the sacrament of reconciliation.
The more we open the door to Jesus, the more we love God and give ourselves to God, the more this indwelling of God in us grows. I think we can see this in St. Paul’s writings. In his letter to the Romans he says we have received the first fruits of the Spirit—first fruits. (Rom 8:23) In the same letter, he promises an even more powerful working of the Spirit in us in the future in our resurrection:
If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also, through his Spirit that dwells in you. (Rom 8:11)
The Spirit of God in us will, so to speak, climax in us in the future in our resurrection.
In the meantime, we love God, keep his commandments, keep his word and open the door to him to allow his divine life grow in us.
© Fr. Tommy Lane 2026
This homily was delivered in a parish in Ireland.
More Homilies for the Sixth Sunday of Easter Year A
The Spirit of God leads us to the truth about the world and ourselves 2023
If you love me you will keep my commandments
Related Homilies: Homilies on loving God