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 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 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 spiritual communion.