Sermon by Father David Beresford
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In your Christian journey, there are moments when you reach a kind of crossroads, when you ask yourself these questions: what difference does being a Christian make? If Christ is in my life, how does that change me? Who is Jesus Christ, and what is he saying to me at this moment?
To the question, “who is Jesus Christ?”, we can answer that Jesus is the Son of God and Son of Man, fully divine and fully human. In him we see our Creator, the God who made us in his image. However, this is not the same as looking in a mirror. When we look in a mirror, we see ourselves reflected back. When we see Jesus, we see God reflected back. If we wish to become the person God made us to be, then we should spend less time looking at ourselves and more time looking at God.
Another question we can ask ourselves is, how does Jesus change me? First, one must accept that, if Jesus wants you to change, it is for your own good. It is better and easier to embrace change and say, “I am willing to change,” than to be stubborn about it. Be aware, though, that the person God made you to be may be different from the person you were before. When we are born, we are subject to many influences—family, circumstances, culture, genes—that determine, to a greater or lesser extent, how we turn out. But they do not—or should not—define us or fix us in one way for the rest of our lives. Adult human beings have agency; they have the capacity and potential to change. We may be the product of our background and upbringing, but we are not necessarily bound to them for the rest of our lives.
That’s just as well. Inside every human being there is a spark—that is, a small agent of change within us. This spark can be activated by hearing the words and teachings of Jesus. This spark, which everyone possesses, is easy to describe but impossible to quantify—it is the spark of life that responds to the call of truth and love. The question for us as adults is, do we honor it or ignore it?
Years ago when I was at university, I had a conversation with someone who attended the same class as me. It was fifty years ago now but I vividly remember speaking with him on the side of a busy road. He told me what it was that helped him to live his life in the best way possible. He said, “you need to live by a code that you can trust and that will keep you on the right path.” At the time I didn’t take his advice to heart but, looking back, I think I understand better now what he meant.
In fact, I found the code to living by following Christ, but it took me half a lifetime to get there. I could say, “I eventually found Christ” but, in fact, Christ had already found me. I wish I had found Jesus at the time I had had that conversation years ago with my college acquaintance—it would have saved me a lot of time. I put it in the category of “I wish I knew then what I know now.” Although the road to here has been rocky at times, the main thing is that I did get here, and that my journey continues.
Today’s gospel reading is like a final year university course for Christians. This is among Jesus’ most profound and advanced teaching. We are used to Jesus teaching through parables, or by healing the sick, or by performing miracles such as the loaves and fish. Today, in the gospel of John, there are no parables or miracles, but a clear and direct teaching about the life Jesus wants us to live. What is this teaching? I said it was like a college-level class, but in other respects it is nothing like that at all.
Consider that when we go to school we learn mostly academic subjects. We learn to think in such a way that there is a separation between our brain and our heart. Sometimes there is an overlap, but often such overlaps are incidental. What is different about the teaching of Jesus is the unity of mind and heart—to fully absorb his teachings, you must engage both.
Let’s simplify this—in the head we have our rational selves; in the heart we have our emotional and loving selves. So when Jesus is teaching as he is today, he has dissolved the separation between head and heart and instead makes a claim on the whole of our being. He doesn’t want us to simply nod and say, “yes, what wonderful teaching” and leave it at that. And he doesn’t want us to turn off our rational mind and use that unhelpful phrase, “just have faith.”
To get the most out of Jesus’ teachings you have to concentrate on his words. What do you notice about them? They include words that are repeated, such as “you” and “I” and “him” and “love.” If we wanted to sum up Jesus’ teaching as it is recorded here, we could describe it as a love letter to his followers.
As such, to be fully understood, what Jesus says must be received with love. Did you ever write a love letter to your boyfriend or girlfriend? You would have used the same kind of language. In this teaching from Jesus, he talks about the Holy Spirit, who will be our Advocate. This is a gift from Jesus to us. Jesus explains that the Holy Spirit “is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him.”
Because the Holy Spirit will be “in us” Jesus is implying that the Spirit will enter our very being, if we give our permission. This will change your life. Having the Spirit of truth in you means living a life without illusion, or pretense, or malice. This can be a challenge in a world where there is much deception and falsehood. People who live in truth learn to speak the truth even if that causes offense.
There is another aspect of Jesus’ teaching that we need to consider today. Jesus, who loves us, asks us to promise something to him. He says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” As God gave the commandments to the Israelites as the rule for their flourishing, so Jesus reminds us that the commandments remain the code for our own health and happiness.
Not everyone finds this easy, because some have mistakenly assumed that Jesus came to sweep all of those bothersome rules away. In fact, the opposite is true. The law contains guidance to keep heart and mind on the straight road. If we want true freedom—the freedom to love and live as God intends—then the commandments are our guardrail. If the gift of the Holy Spirit was part of our invitation to live in freedom, the other part of that freedom is the gift of the commandments.
All of us here today come from different backgrounds—different families, upbringings, ethnicities, even different countries. Yet we all share some things in common. In our worship we become one body in Christ. Our ears are open to hear his words and our minds and hearts are willing to be changed by them. We share, I hope, a desire to live not by lies, but by adhering to the truth.
All of us carry within us that spark which compels us to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ. Whether we know it or not, he found us years ago and has never let us go. We follow him because of love—his love for us and our love for him. Along the way we are being changed into his likeness by the grace of God and in the power of the Holy Spirit. He leads us into life in all its fullness—that is his promise to us.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Father David Beresford
May 10, 2026