Seventh
Sunday of Easter A 2023
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. In the Johannine Gospel, we find the love
of God demonstrated and explained as nowhere else. Then in John’s 17th 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 life -- witnesses to the
resurrection.
Jesus
finished the work the Father had given Him to do. What about us? Do I have a sense of the work God has given
me to do? In other words, what is the
purpose of my life. As a parent, as a
sibling, as a leader, as a parishioner, as a member of the community of the
baptized, what is the work that God has given you to do. We are very grounded in discipleship if we
try to make the prayer of Jesus our own prayer.
This very evening, I invite you to reflect on the day and with a prayer
of gratitude may we say in prayer that we have finished the work God has given
us to do for this day. If there is room
for improvement, we ask for the Holy Spirit to be with us tomorrow.
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 that 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 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.
Jesus in His
prayer to his heavenly Father prayed for us with the words: This is eternal life, that they should know
you, the only true God, and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ
What is so
important for us as we seek eternal life with God is that eternal life is not
just for the future: it a gift partly
given now in our faith. To be in touch
with Jesus is to be in touch with a rich and full eternal life. Something is given which will last forever –
the mysterious life of God. We touch
into that life in prayer. We are
enlightened by Jesus, the light of the world.
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.
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. God’s love is like the air we breathe – all
around us, giving us life, sustaining us.
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 in communion.
Have a
Blessed Day.
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