Easter 6 (John 14:23-29) “I do not give to you as the world gives.”

Jesus is the superabundance of God’s love. There is no scarcity in Jesus. There are no limits to his gifts.

There is scarcity in the way the world gives.

When Jesus speaks of the world he is not referring to the planet. He is identifying the culture of scarcity that human beings create. The planet itself is rich with abundant resources. The human heart is narrow, constricted and fearful.

God creates abundance. Man creates scarcity.

The abundance of God is available to people at every possible level of human experience. The abundance of God encompasses material, emotional, psychological, intellectual and spiritual needs and desires. The scarcity man creates is by restricted access to divine abundance.

Scarcity proceeds from fear. The fear is that there will not be enough. The fear is that someone will take from me what I need and indeed what is mine and mine alone by right. The fear is that many perhaps most people are undeserving.

In this passage, Jesus reminds us that all abundance derives from love. The love of which Jesus speaks is the infinite and eternal love of God. It is not the conditional contractual love human beings practice. Jesus once said; God makes his sun to shine on the just and the unjust; God makes the rain to fall on the righteous and the unrighteous. This unrestricted divine abundance is anathema to most human beings most of the time.

Certainly, religious people in Jesus’ day believed only the righteous deserve the blessing. Only those who hold right belief and practice right action are worthy of God’s attention and favor.

Jesus is God telling us and demonstrating for us that divine love is universal and unconditional. Jesus is God telling us and showing us that none of us are righteous. All of us hold belief in the context of the distortion of sin. All of us practice good works in the context of an expectation for recognition and reward.

What made it so difficult for people to hear Jesus and receive Jesus was the universal unconditional love of Jesus.

One of my favorite bumper stickers reads: God loves everybody but I am His favorite.

Jesus reminds that God has no favorites. God shows no partiality. Jesus offers the infinite and eternal abundance of God to everyone.

The problem our species confronts is the problem our species creates. It is the problem of scarcity. That scarcity proceeds from the choice humanity made to separate from God. As we separate from God we separate from each other. As we separate from each other we define each other as unrighteous rivals for what we perceive to be limited physical and spiritual resources.

As we separate from God and from each other we separate from the Image and Likeness of God imprinted on our souls. We exist in this world with fear of this world.

Jesus offers a new life with a new way of living. The new life is the original blessing  of divine love. The new way of living is characterized by the original pattern of love. That blessing and pattern is the Peace of God which passes all understanding. It is a life of courageous compassion with the confidence in divine abundance.

Jesus also tells us that His Peace comes from the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The Peace of God is not detachment from life. The peace of God is full engagement with life in union with the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is our Advocate who speaks for us and helps us identify where we need to transform the distortion of sin back into the original pattern of the original blessing. The Holy Spirit is our teacher who encourages us, inspires us, and equips us to read, study and memorize scripture.

Scripture reveals the original pattern of the original blessing in the experience of many different people over the course of thousands of years. As we study the pattern the Holy Spirit will apply the pattern to the way we live our lives here and now.

The world culture of scarcity produces an ideology of scarcity. That ideology of scarcity produces fear. Fear inevitably leads to conflict and conflict perpetuates death. For the world culture everything has a price and no one is ever secure.

Jesus breaks the cycle of separation, scarcity, fear, conflict and death by absorbing all of it and experiencing all of it on the cross. On the cross he transforms it by love back into love. On the cross Jesus pays the price.

The peace Jesus offers is not like the peace the world culture offers. The peace Jesus offers insures that there are no winners and losers. There are only the beloved of the co-eternal Beloved. In that love there is abundance beyond imagination.