“I gave them your word, and the world hated them…” (John 17:15).

The haunting work of German artist Käthe Kollwitz reflects the great suffering caused by the two world wars in Europe. Her final lithograph, titled “Seeds for the Sowing,” completed in 1945 just months before her death, shows a mother sheltering her children under her arms. Hope in a time of destruction lies in protecting the next generation. If the seed set aside for planting is ground up, there is no future. The sketch here only approximates but cannot approach the power of the original, which can be viewed online, along with Kollwitz’s story and other art.

Both readings for today’s liturgy, from John and from Acts, were composed during a time of suffering and stress in the early church. Internal divisions over as yet unformed theologies and the threat of persecution were forcing the first communities to protect their countercultural identity in a hostile world. In Acts 20, Paul, who is on his way to Rome to stand trial, predicts that false teachers will invade the fragile faith communities “like wolves in the flock.” In John 17, Jesus prays for the disciples: “Father, I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the Evil One. Consecrate them in the truth.”

To consecrate is to set aside for special purpose. The first disciples -- men and women – are the seed set aside for planting. They carry the future of the truth Jesus has revealed about God and about human destiny, and it must be protected until it can take root and grow strong within the dominant cultures that will neither understand nor welcome it.

Each one of us is a seed of promise meant to be sown into the dark earth for the sake of those who will come after us. Seed ground up for consumption or left unplanted bears no fruit and fails its essential purpose. We pray for the Holy Spirit, who nurtures all that is good in us and will multiply what we plant a hundredfold.

“Now you are talking plainly, and not in any figure of speech” (John 16:29).

Jesus once told his disciples he had much to say to them but they “cannot bear it now." If you are Irish or even half Irish, as I am, you think bad news. But there are also things we need to know that are too wonderful to bear. We simply cannot absorb them all at once. It is said that some people who pray fervently for something can’t take “yes” for an answer. They are convinced that what God wants must involve great trial and suffering, and so they are prepared for "no" or "pray harder." In fact, just when we think everything is breaking down, we experience a breakthrough. What feels like dying turns out to be rebirth.

Ask Saul of Tarsus. This fire-breathing inquisitor was stopped in his tracks by the crucified, risen Christ. The knowledge he received about who Jesus really was was so overwhelming it blinded him. He spent a long time in the wilderness (“Arabia,” he writes) letting the truth of Jesus’ lordship sink in and, even more challenging, his own role as an apostle of the Good News of universal salvation.

In today’s passage from John’s Gospel, Jesus tells disciples that for a time things are going to get worse, but then they will get better. And in the end, everything is going to succeed in a burst of grace and triumph. “Take courage, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

We, too, are in the zone. Pentecost is coming. Now is the time to open ourselves wide for what God will freely give to anyone who asks for it -- the Holy Spirit. And when it feels like it just might cost us everything, keep going forward, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.

“When a woman is in labor, she is in anguish because her hour has come” (John 16:21).

The image of birth to describe the pregnant anticipation of the community of believers huddled in an upper room in Jerusalem after Jesus’ departs is appropriate. Once conception occurs, gestation and then birth must follow; either that, or end in miscarriage, stillbirth or even abortion. Couples who have prepared for a birth with Lamaze classes know the anxiety mixed with joy in the weeks that lead up to due date. Learning to breathe, to recognize the signs of impending labor (the water breaks, contractions begin) makes both mother and father participants in the miracle that will change their lives, gives them a future and allow them to contribute to the survival of the human species itself. The authority of a woman in labor and of a new mother is unrivaled. No emperor or commander of legions can do what she does. Her labor of love makes possible our human world.

The Jerusalem faith community is in labor. Their utter sense of inadequacy to take up the mission of Jesus overwhelms them with fear and doubt. But they gather to fast and pray; Mary the mother of Jesus is in their midst, perhaps recounting the overshadowing of the Spirit, the circumstances of that first birth into poverty, surrounded by a hostile world intent on killing the newborn, flight and return. It is a story they will repeat, yet always under the mysterious protection and power of the Holy Spirit. On Pentecost, the great Jewish feast of harvest, all the essentials will be present, like a woman making bread with flower, water, oil and salt, mixing in the mysterious leaven that makes it rise, its aroma filling the house, calling a hungry world to the table of life.

We move as individuals and in community through a succession of births to become ourselves before God, full stature, full freedom, midwives to others by sharing the Word and the Spirit through our acts of love. This is about life, abundant life, about replacing the old leaven of fear and hurt with the new leaven of spirit and truth. We are in labor, in agony as we surrender to transformation, yet also joyful in anticipation. By submitting to something so much greater than ourselves, we will welcome the body of Christ into our world, in and through us.

“We should like to hear you on this some other time” (Acts 17:32).

The threshold from reason to faith is perhaps the most difficult one to cross for an intelligent and naturally skeptical mind. Aquinas saw theology and philosophy as pursuing the same reality, but knew that logic has its limits and the passage to faith, especially Christian faith, involves a gift that, once accepted, can then be explored by human understanding.

No one confronted this threshold as directly as Paul when he arrived in Athens, the cradle of Greek philosophy. Paul took pride in his classical education and rhetorical skills. So when he went to the Aereopagus, a rocky hill where the high court met amid shrines to various gods, he saw his chance to preach the Gospel when he found an altar dedicated to an “Unknown God,” (revealing, perhaps, how smart the Greeks were to cover all their bases in matters of religion). Paul waxes eloquent in support of natural religion, the logic of unseen powers holding the universe in order. But as he speaks of a man named Jesus, crucified and risen from the dead, his listeners dismiss Paul as just another street preacher.

Paul’s subsequent letter to the Corinthians seems to indicate that he was stung by his failure to impress the sophisticated and skeptical deep thinkers in Athens. He abandons any pretensions to eloquence and embraces the mystery of the cross of Jesus as a “scandal to Jews and as foolishness to the Greeks" (see 1 Cor 1:20-24). He further downplays any wisdom on his part, saying that only by the Spirit can anyone grasp the “wisdom” of the crucified Christ. Paul is so adamant that no human persuasion can convey this wisdom, he even seems to suggest that he has a speech impediment of some kind in order to show that whatever success he has had as a preacher was purely the work of the Spirit.

The human search for truth is, of course, more than intellectual. Life experiences of both joy and sorrow, gain and loss, and ultimately the inevitability of death, are the real teachers that invite the mind to proceed from logic and reason to art and faith, and finally to the choice whether to see life as culminating in despair and disintegration or in hope of some deeper mystery beyond death. Paul preached what he experienced – life in Christ, here and hereafter.