Jer 32: 38-41; Eph 4: 11-17; Jn 15: 12-17

As you come to the end of your time in the College, you have many reasons to give thanks to God. All you have shared and learned and experienced here, are part, of what you are.  Those years will, in a sense, go with you all through your lives.

You are gathered here almost for the last time – apart from the little matter of the Leaving Cert! But you are not just “the Sixth Years”. What is said in the Gospel is not just said to the group, it is said to each one of you.

 “I have chosen you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will last”.  Each of you has his own talents and will have his own opportunities.  Each of your lives is unique.  In a very short time, you will no longer be “the Sixth Years”; that lofty title will have passed on to another group.  Each of you will be travelling his own road.  The readings are reminding you that you will not travel alone: ‘I have chosen you; you are my friends; God the Father will grant you anything you ask in the name of Jesus; go and bear fruit that will last”.

In the distant future, when some of you gather to celebrate the tenth or the twentieth or even the fiftieth anniversary of leaving the College you will be amazed at the great variety of careers you have followed and countries you have lived in, of the achievements and disappointments, the sorrows and joys that life has brought to each of you – things you had never foreseen or imagined.

It is a frightening thought that you are setting out on a journey and that the road ahead is completely unknown and unknowable.  There are no sat-navs for the journey of life!  The apostle Thomas asked “How can we know the way?”(Jn 14:15) Jesus answered “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life”.  And he tells us in tonight’s Gospel what that means: “Love each other as I have loved you”.

That sounds simple enough, but loving other people as Jesus loved us could not be more demanding.  He gave everything, even his life – no one has greater love than that. Wew always fall short of his example.  None of us goes through life without causing unnecessary pain to others, without letting others down, without taking advantage of others, without looking down on others, without putting our convenience before their crying needs. But the great thing about the road we travel is that it always calls us on to greater things, to give ourselves more fully not only to each other but to God who takes pleasure in doing good things for us. We are always called on to grow in the truth and love that form the motto of the College.

You are in God’s hands.  The quotation on the cover of your booklet says that: “I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope” (Jer 29:11) . But the road remains unknown to us with all its bends and potholes and detours.  Keeping to the road is not simple.  It means being convinced of your dignity and your freedom and of God’s love for so as not to be tossed back and forth and blown here and there by every wind and every deceit.  That means knowing what you believe.  It means knowing how vulnerable we are, how uncertain the road, how unpredictable the events that may strike us.  There is no need to stress that uncertainty in the world in which we live.  You were still in primary school when we celebrated the new millennium with great hopes.  Now, less than ten years later we have seen 9/11, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, increasing fears about global warming, and a disastrous economic collapse.  It would be easy to feel helpless.

But what you have learned here and what you learned first of all in your families is to know that we are loved by God who is stronger than every uncertainty and fear.  We have been chosen to go out and bear fruit that will last. God says to each of us, “I will never stop doing good for you”.

You are coming to a big new crossroads in your journey.  The readings you have chosen are telling you not to let the unknown future frighten you. The Father will grant you what you ask in the name of Jesus.  You are in God’s hands.  God will never stop doing good for you. There will be times when that will be hard to believe.  But we have sung in this Mass, “He will raise you up on eagles’ wings.”  We pray for you this evening, that when you do gather with some of your classmates in ten or twenty or fifty years, you will have understood more deeply how God has never stopped doing good for you.

+Donal Murray