In the final weeks of the Easter Season, our gospel readings are from the Farewell Discourse of Jesus at the Last Supper, an important source for understanding the liturgy, the sacraments and especially the Eucharist. The Farewell Discourse is read by the latin church and all the eastern churches at this time.

The readings are more than a picture of the Last Supper. The Farewell Discourse also reveals the experience of Jesus his first followers had when they ate and drank with him after his resurrection.

They’re troubled, even in the presence of Jesus. They experience joy, but they also realize that soon he will not be with them physically.  They’re becoming orphans, they feel.. They’re uncertain and have questions, even as  Jesus tells them he is the way. “Do not let your hearts be troubled and afraid,” he says to them.

They question him even as he promises great things: “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be.” (John 14:1-6) They’re uneasy.

 “A little while and you will no longer see me, and again a little while later and you will see me.” So some of his disciples said to one another, “What does this mean that he is saying to us, ‘A little while and you will not see me, and again a little while and you will see me,’ and ‘Because I am going to the Father’? ”So they said, “What is this ‘little while’ [of which he speaks]? We do not know what he means.” (John 15:17)

Patristic teachers like Ambrose and Cyril of Jerusalem saw a similarity in the experience of the disciples and the experience of a newly baptized Christian. They are called to know Jesus in the limitations of sacraments and life in a sacramental age. “Is this it? Ambrose hears them say. Cyril appeals to the sacramental signs that reveal the mystery. Trust the signs, he says.

“In the sacraments Christ himself is at work” the catechism says, “ it is he who baptizes, he who acts in his sacraments in order to communicate the grace that each sacrament signifies.” (Cat. 1127)  Yet it’s the Christ of faith at work. “Although you have not seen him you love him; even though you do not see him now yet believe in him,” Peter says. (1 Peter 1:3-9)

We usually go to theological summaries like that in the Catechism of the Catholic Faith ( Cat. 1066-1690 ) when we want information on the sacraments, but we shouldn’t forget this liturgical source.  John’s Farewell Discourse was the early church’s basic source for learning about the world of signs that Jesus left his disciples after his resurrection. The Farewell Discourse offers a more existential picture of sacramental life in a sacramental church than theological summaries do.

One of the reasons we read the Acts of the Apostles along with the Farewell Discourse in the Easter Season is that Acts pictures the church growing despite the misgivings of Jesus’ disciples, who yearn for his physical presence. Movements usually die when their leaders die; the church grew when Jesus passed from this life to the Father. 

In his Farewell Discourse, Jesus says that loving him brings us to keep his commandments and leads us to love the Father. “Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him” (John 14: 21-26) 

Raymond Brown in his commentary on the Farewell Discourse makes the interesting observation that Jesus only speaks of loving him at this time in the gospel, namely at the time of his death and resurrection. He never mentions loving him during his ministry in Galilee and in Judea. 

Love appears now because his death and resurrection are supreme signs of his love. Jesus shows his disciples the wounds in his hands and his side, not just as proof that he is alive, but as signs of his great love, which calls for love in return.

The Sign of his Cross, which recalls the death and resurrection of Jesus, is the great sign of the Easter Season. It’s remembered in the gospels, the sacraments. It’s the sign of the sacramental age. 

Readings here