As we eavesdrop on the prayer of Jesus in today's Gospel, we are indeed entering holy ground.

In today’s Gospel, we are entering upon very holy ground.  Throughout the Gospel of John, we see the compassionate heart of Jesus as He brings healing to sick people and food to the hungry.  We meet His power in raising the dead.  There is no more heartening book in all scripture that this Gospel.  Every chapter is given for our benefit.  In this book we find the love of God demonstrated and explained as nowhere else.  Then In John’s 17^th chapter, we are allowed to glimpse into Jesus’ very soul.

Perhaps we never get any closer to someone else than when we know about their prayer life.  As we eavesdrop on the prayer of Jesus in today’s Gospel, we are indeed entering holy ground.

The setting for this prayer of Jesus is the upper room on the eve of Jesus’s passion and death.  Jesus had just celebrated the Last Supper with his disciples and had washed their feet to give them an example of how they were to continue the mission of Jesus in the life of the Church.

Jesus’s impending death is not a disruption of God’s plan but part of God’s mysterious providence.  Jesus had accomplished His work, revealing the love of the Father for us.  Now it is the time to teach the meaning of that love by His willingness to lay down even His own life.  His dying is his greatest act of giving.

The Lord prayed for his disciples gathered around Him.  At the same time, he looked ahead to the community of disciples of all centuries.  In His prayer for disciples of all time, he saw us too, and he prayed for us.  He prayed that we be consecrated in truth.

“Jesus raised his eyes to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come.  Give glorify to your Son, so that your Son may glorify you…I have glorified you on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do…I have made your name known to those you have given me…They were yours and you gave them to me…Consecrate them in truth…I have made your name known to them so that the love with which you loved may be in them, and so that I may be in them.”

The prayer of Jesus to his heavenly Father was a prayer of gratitude that Jesus had finished the work that the Father had given Him to do.  He had made the Lord’s name known to His followers.

Jesus then prayed for us His disciples.  Jesus prayed that we would let God love us and live in us.  To do that, we need, first of all, to trust that God truly does love us.  As John says, we need to know and to believe in the love God has for us.  When we let the reality of God’s love for us sink deeply into who we are and what we believe, something dramatic happens.  We begin to love one another.  We become witnesses to God’s love by letting everyone else see what that love looks like when it is alive in a person’s life.   By being loved so deeply, we become lovers.  We become witnesses to the God whose love brings eternal live – witnesses to the resurrection.

Of course, it would be naïve to think that this is a simple process.  The first followers of Jesus knew all about the resistance to the extraordinary good news about God’s love Jesus had brought to them.  They knew about the betrayal of Judas, about their own abandonment of Jesus, and about Jesus’ death on Calvary.  God created the world and everything in it good.  But in ways that are hard to understand, there is sometimes abandonment and betrayal of this goodness.  There is hostility and resistance in our world to the message of God’s love for us – in the bombing in Manchester, England, in the political warfare that takes place in the halls of our Congress, in the Church itself there can be hypocrisy and disillusionment, and in our personal and family relationships there can be too much brokenness.  We know all too well the demons we have within ourselves that keep us from witnessing to the forgiving love of God in all circumstances of life.

Being a witness to the resurrection is not just telling people what they can hope for after death.  Yes, such hope is so very important.   God will raise us from death to live with God forever. God’s love is stronger than death.   But being a witness to the resurrection begins in the here and the now.  Being a witness to the resurrection means letting people see in our lives what it looks like when we live in the God who is love.  It means making visible what happens when the God who is love lives in us.

This past Thursday, I had the privilege of celebrating the Ascension Thursday Mass with the students of St Joseph’s School.  It is inspiring for me to be immersed in the music of the school choir and to experience the beautiful prayerfulness and faith of our students.  I have the same feeling in giving First Communion to our second graders.  Indeed these students and First Communicants are consecrated in the mystery of God’s love.  Their lives are so very, very precious.

It is our awesome responsibility as a parish community to be witnesses to these young parishioners of how the love of God sustains us in all the challenging moments of life.  Can we in the community of St. Joseph’s and in the town of Penfield live our lives in such a way that these young students are surrounded by people who are willing to serve and give and sacrifice so that these precious young students will know God’s love by the witness of our lives?

For Jesus his dying is his greatest act of giving.  How to our lives characterize what gospel living is all about?

John’s Gospel tells us that Jesus prayed for His followers.  He prays that His Father consecrate them in truth.  The truth he refers to is the truth of God’s love.  To be consecrated in the truth means being consecrated or made holy in God’s love.  It is like being immersed in God’s love like a swimmer immersed in the sea or a surfer riding the waves.  God’s love is like the air we breathe – all around us, giving us life, sustaining us.  Jesus’ prayer for his disciples and for us is that we keep swimming in this love, keep breathing it in.  When we do this, we may experience some of the resistance and hostility that Jesus experienced, but Jesus has promised that God’s Spirit will be with us and will never abandon us.  This will enable us to be witnesses to God’s love even in a sometimes hostile world.  Let’s trust in that love as we come to the Table of the Lord.

Have a Blessed Day.

Jesus shares with us three important lessons of love.

Each year on the Sixth Sunday of Easter, the lectionary gently shifts us toward the Pentecost mystery with the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles illustrating the Lord’s abiding presence in the community as manifested in the evolution and exercise of authority in the Church.  The apostles Peter and John went down into Samaria, and they laid hands on the newly baptized and they received the Holy Spirit.

Then in the first letter of Peter, Peter writes:  “Beloved, sanctify Christ as Lord in your heart.”  Peter goes on to say:  “Christ was put to death in the flesh; he was brought to life in the Spirit.”

In the Gospel, Jesus prays:  “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of Truth.”

To prepare us for the great feast of Pentecost, Jesus gives us three lessons on love  -- the power of love, the person  of love, and the proof of love.

1.      THE POWER OF LOVE -  In the words of Jesus, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments…Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me.”

We must be so very careful how we hear this.  It is possible to understand the commandments has “If you love me, prove it by keeping the commandments…Loving God becomes a kind of human achievement.  This I suggest is a failed understanding of the grace of God in our lives.  The call to love is not just a matter of spiritual will power.

If we understand this text from the standpoint of grace it yields a different understanding.  Loving God is a gift of God.   God’s grace is given to us so very freely.   So the meaning is:  If you love me, you will by this love I have given you keep my commandments.  Keeping the commandments is the fruit of love, not the cause of it.  Love comes first.  When love is received and experienced, we begin by the power of that love to keep the commandments.

Yes, it is possible to keep the commandments to some extent out of fear.  But in doing so, we lose out on the great mystery that has been given to us from the moment of our baptism.  We are God’s beloved.

If is far better to keep the commandments by the grace of God’s love at work within us.

Living with the mystery of God’s grace, love is always extravagant and expansive.

Do we sometimes says we love God but then ask such things:  ”Do I have to go to Church?  Do I have to pray?  And if so, how often and for how long?  Do I have to go to confession?  And if so, how frequently?  What’s the least amount I can put in the collection or give to the poor and still be in compliance with the tithing that the Lord asks of us?  

Now I was born at night but not last night.  I understand we have busy lives and our prayer life can easily get squeezed out in the midst of all the commitments I have.

But to prepare us for the great Pentecost mystery that God is to be the true North Star of our lives, Jesus is giving us this lesson on the power of love.   Love doesn’t talk or think like what is the least I have to do be a disciples of Jesus.  Love has the power to transform our desires from our selfish ends, toward the beloved, toward God Himself.

Asking for moral guidelines may not be wrong, but too often the question seems to want the bare minimum.

Love is extravagant and excited to do and to give.  Love has an incredible power.

In the first letter of John we read:  “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments.  And his commandments are not burdensome.”  Yes, love lightens every load.  We keep his commandments, not because we have to, but because we want to.   And even if his commandments involve significant changes, love excites us with a desire to keep God’s love, to fulfill His wishes for us.

2.       THE PERSON OF LOVE    In the words of Jesus:  “I will ask the Father and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot accept, because it neither sees nor knows him. He remains with you and will be with you.”

T   The third person of the Blessed Trinity, living in us as in a temple, will change us and stir us to love, He who is love will love God in us.  We love because He has first loved us.

      We worship God in a Trinity of persons.  We come to experience God as a person who has an unending love for us.  In the words of Jesus, “By this all shall that you are my disciples, by your love for one another.”  Our spirituality is relational, relational, relational.  This is how we are known as the disciples of Jesus.

3.       THE PROOF OF GOD’S LOVE   In the words of Jesus:  “I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you.  In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me, because I live and you will live.  On that day you will realize that I am in my Father and you are in me and I in you.”

Simply put:  The proof of God’s love and its power to transform is ourselves.  It is our lives. I have within myself the life of the Spirit of Jesus.  Jesus has made His home within me.  I have within myself the wellspring of eternal life.  I am not an orphan.  Rather I am God’s beloved son.  I am a witness of the proof of God’s love.

I am a witness of God’s love, are you?

Have a blessed day. 

Thank you Mothers for sharing your love with your children and with all children.

Jesus said to his disciples and says to us:  "Do not let your hearts  be troubled.  Have faith in God; have faith also in me."  The Scriptures today focus our spiritual compass to immerse ourselves in our sharing in the peace and joy of the Risen Lord.  The Gospels for the first three Sundays of the Easter Season recount the appearances of the Risen Lord to his first disciples.  Last Sunday, the Fourth Sunday of Easter, Jesus describes Himself as the Good Shepherd who is our rock and spiritual guide. This Sunday's and next Sunday's Gospels focus on Jesus' Last Supper Discourse in which Jesus prepares us to witness to His mission and ministry in the life of the Church.

We are to wash the feet of God's poor.  We are to witness to the merciful love of Jesus in the life and ministry of the Church.  We are to share with one and all the Peace and Joy of the Risen Lord.

Under the category that nothing happens by accident.  Today we celebrate Mother's Day.  Moms thank you for the love you share with your children and thank you for the love you share with our entire parish family.  You witness so beautifully to the Easter message and teach us the meaning of love and being loved. You are our true spiritual compass to the Gospels most important values.

This weekend we also celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the appearance of Our Lady to the three precious children in Fatima, Portugal.  In 1917, the world was getting caught in the horror of World War I, and Our Lady's Message to the children of Fatima was a message of peace,  100 years later, we seek the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima as we seek a new era of peace in our day.

In the Gospel, Jesus goes on to say:   "In my Father's house, there are many dwelling places."  We often pray over this Gospel as referring to the many dwelling places in the kingdom of heaven.  Equally there are many dwelling places in the here and the now of our lives in which God can be found.  In fact, in the uniqueness of the spiritual journey of each one of us, God is be found in all of our life experiences.

We seek the spiritual sightedness to recognize the presence of God from day to day, from moment to moment.

Like Thomas in the Gospel, we can get derailed and lose our spiritual path.  Jesus calls Thomas and all of us to recognize the He is the Way and the Truth and the Life.  The true North Star of our lives is Jesus.

As we breathe out all that troubles our hearts on this day, may we breathe in the Holy Spirit and be rooted in the merciful love of Jesus.

Have a blessed day!

All of us have a vocational story to discern and to share.

The fourth Sunday of the Easter season is always Good Shepherd Sunday.  Jesus identifies Himself as the Good Shepherd.  The good shepherd is one who comes to his sheep and is recognized by them. The sheep recognize his voice as he calls them by name.

What are the voices in your life  which you know that you are safe and very much loved?  How well do you recognize the voice of Jesus in your life?

What would it take for the voice of the Good Shepherd to be the dominant voice that we hear in our society?  Perhaps a better advertising firm?  An improved website?  More money?  Surely, it is much deeper than that.  There is a critical need for moral leadership in our society and in our Church.  We need to be able to hear the stirrings of God's love that is within -- our inner voice.

For the voice of the Good Shepherd to be our dominant voice, we need to tap into the inner resources of the mystery of God love that is within each one of us,  There is a longing in the hearts of each of us to hear and to know the voice of he Good Shepherd.

I think we all agree that Pope Francis is such a beautiful example for us of the Good Shepherd.  Pope Francis is calling us to serve a purpose greater than ourselves, to get over our self-concern and devote ourselves to the concerns of others,  That means we can't sit behind the desks of our sanitized environments.  Pope Francis reminds that the Good Shepherd should smell like the sheep.  We are to immerse ourselves in the mud of human failures, human sins, and human problems.  The Pope says emphatically that Church leaders are to go out to the margins of human life, where people are actually living, and understand what they are going through before we can offer solutions that will matter.

Today is a World Day of Prayer for vocations.  Our vocation is our response to the call of God in our lives,  By Baptism, God calls us to be disciples, to be witnesses of His presence in the world.  All of us have a vocational story to tell.  Your vocational story is your continuous response to God's call.  To be aware of your vocation is to be aware of the voice of God in your life.

For me, the vocation of my ministry as a priest has been a source of grace, considerable joy, and a wonderful opportunity to make a difference in people's lives. It has given me the opportunity to get to know you and for us together to celebrate the mystery of God love in our midst.

May all of us listen to God's call on this day.  For all of us have a vocational story to discern.

What are the voices we hear that help us to discern God's call?  May we pray  today for the grace to recognize the call of Jesus the Good Shepherd of our lives.