Readings (Year A):
Acts 6:1–7
Psalm 33:1–2, 4–5, 18–19
1 Peter 2:4–9
John 14:1–12
Reflection: How can we do the works that Jesus did?
Her name is Keira, and she is 22. I don’t know her. And yet, for those of us who know what it is to love someone too far away to reach or protect—whether it’s distance, disease, or tensions in the relationship—I feel Keira’s story could be our story. On a call from Kuwait, Keira teased her brother about turning 21. She didn’t know it would be their last conversation, before a drone took his life. She cried: “I just really wish I got to tell him I love him one more time.”
After a sudden loss, we return to those last conversations—reaching for every detail, grieving words left unsaid. When I was caring for my mom during her final days, I was getting her dressed when she shared that she had dreamed of a beautiful place. Struggling to speak but wanting me to know: her father was there—and my father was there too. Intrigued, but rushed, I didn’t fully take it in. I regret not pausing to savor that dream with her. And yet, love was already there, in our presence together, just like it was with Keira and her brother.
And so I think of the disciples in today’s gospel: Shaken, but together, returning to that long Holy Thursday conversation, reaching to recall every word from their last time together when he was alive. In all that grief and fear and uncertainty, came a call they struggled to understand: “Where I am going, you know the way.” They heard that as a road leading to a place. But he corrected: “I am the way.” Not a map, but a way of living. A way that he had already shown them when he knelt to wash their feet.
Later, when the Holy Spirit descended as he promised, everything changed. That last, long conversation made sense. And fear gave way to courage.
Every “you” Jesus speaks in today’s text is plural—not one, but all. Not me, but us.
They stepped out, together, with urgency. They met the moment and put their lives on the line. They started building a community of living stones, a place where no widow, no poor person was left out.
Jesus said, “whoever believes in me will do the works that I do.” How can we do that, in a world still aching for mercy, still marked by conflict, still in urgent need of peacemakers?
Situated in the emptiness of the cosmos, above our beautiful oasis, an astronaut reminded us that we are all the same. From that vantage point, divisions fall away. What remains is:
a world already filled with love, often unseen. A world where there is no “us and them,” but only us.
We can choose to live into the truth of the gospel. But it’s not a way without cost. The early Christians put everything on the line. What would it look like for you, for me, to live the way to live the truth? When love asks more than we might want to give—to say “I love you” every time, to stop and listen even when you’re rushed, to hear Christ’s call out of darkness into wonderful light?
Friends, together, we will meet our moment to build the house Peter envisioned.
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