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Sunday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - 18 May 2014


Fr Robin Gibbons

Fr Robin Gibbons

Fifth Sunday of Easter

Philip is one of my names, excuse me for being personal, but I believe that the saints, whose names we take also take on us too, so the Sunday Gospel of John 14. where Philip plays a part in it, grabs me somewhat! Philip was called early on to follow Jesus, so he has been with him through all his mission and ministry, but here as John shows us, despite all that he did with Jesus, he still does not understand who he is! In that he is at one with Thomas, both of them doubters!

But I feel I must stand up for my patron, he seems to be a thinking person and wants proof; ‘Let us see…’ he says!

It’s alright for those of us whose faith and perception allows us to straddle the centuries between gospel accounts and today and follow the advice and insights of scholars and saints who tell us that Jesus is alive and risen and is with us! That’s ok! But it needs to be part of our lives, we need to make it something that is more than a creed or a formula of faith. You see the disciples dealt with the living, bodily present man, who they slept next to, eat with, walked, talked, listened to, he was theirs and suddenly he was gone.

So, I’m one with Thomas and Philip, I too want to know who is this way, truth and life and I want to go on that journey to the place he has prepared! I want to walk as a child of the light, I too want to see Jesus! Then an answer comes, as it did for me this week when I was moved by the death of the teenager Stephen Sutton, whose journey I and so many shared via the web. It came for me in the horrors of the Turkish mine disaster and the Syrian mess. There in that world is Christ, he is in his little ones, in his people, he it is who speaks and reaches out, suddenly like Philip and Thomas I begin to see that my Lord is with us on our journey. For where we are, he is always. As Philip did I follow Jesus, I thought in my arrogance I would not find him, but instead he comes to me and speaks in the love beyond words.

Fr Robin Gibbons is an Eastern Rite Chaplain for the Melkite Greek Catholics in Britain.

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