Acts 16. 16 – 34
John 17. 20 – 26
Fr Alex
On Thursday we celebrated the Ascension, and next Sunday we celebrate the Day of Pentecost, and the gift of the Spirit.
Liturgically, we’re in a kind of in-between-time, where we’re encouraged to imitate the disciples in their devotion to prayer, and pondering the mysteries of the Resurrection; and we await with them the gift of the Holy Spirit.
But of course the aim of our liturgical calendar is not pious re-enactment: but rather to help us enter into the mystery behind our marking of the seasons. To discover the deeper reality of God, revealed in Jesus.
And that is brought home for us in our little Gospel reading today.
Each year n this Sunday between Ascension and Pentecost we hear a section of John 17, what’s known as Jesus’ ‘High Priestly Prayer.’ We are in Year C, so we’ve just heard the third and final part of the prayer.
At the Last Supper, just before Jesus goes out to Gethsemane, he “looks up to heaven” and prays for himself, his disciples, and all who will come to believe: and he prays for unity between them. And more than just unity: “that they may become completely one.”
This ‘oneness’ far surpasses our human concept of unity. It’s not just getting along despite differences; it’s not something that can be gained or lost by our own efforts. It is the deeper reality of the intrinsic oneness of God, which Jesus reveals to us.
Jesus says at the end of this prayer, “I made your name known to them, and I will make it known.” Our translation doesn’t quite capture the magnitude of this. Jesus hasn’t simply told his followers what God’s name is. ‘Name,’ here, is a figure of speech: to reveal God’s ‘name’ in this sense, is in fact to reveal the very character of God.
In other words, in coming to know Jesus, we come to know God, and we have seen in him everything about God that God wants us to know.
And having revealed the oneness of God in him, he invites his followers, and us, to share in that oneness. He says, “the glory that you have given me I have given them;” and he prays, “as you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.”
Our share in that oneness is what we’re celebrating in this time: the great gift of the Incarnation, fulfilled in the Ascension. God the Son comes down to earth to take on our humanity; and at his Ascension, returns to God the Father, in and with that humanity.
This is our ultimate destiny, to be gathered up into the oneness of God. As Jesus prays today, “Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory.”
But as Fr Kenneth said on Thursday evening, one of the mistakes we can make at this time is thinking that the Ascension is all about marking Jesus’ departure from us.
But in fact we don’t lose Jesus, at his Ascension: we gain him, even more profoundly. He ceases to be in one place and one time, and goes into all places, and all times. In a sense, the glory and the oneness of God is ‘diffused’ throughout creation.
And so Jesus isn’t simply praying today for something that awaits us in the life to come – a future glory, or a oneness yet to be completed. He is calling the disciples, and us, to become part of that oneness in our lives now. To enter into the deeper reality of God, revealed in him.
And that is exactly what we’re doing today, and at every Eucharist. Each time we gather together and receive the bread and wine, we catch a glimpse not just of the oneness that awaits us in the life to come; but the deeper reality of the oneness that even now surrounds us, and in which we are invited to share.
As we receive within ourselves Christ’s very presence—God’s very presence—the words of Christ’s High Priestly Prayer are made real for us: “I will make [your name] known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” Christ gives us his body, and in doing so, makes us one body with him, and one another.
And so we see that the unity for which Christ prays today is not a goal yet to be realised; it is not something we can create or manufacture through our own force of will.
It is entering into that which has already been brought about in the life and ministry of Jesus, and his giving of himself in the Eucharist; and, as we will celebrate next Sunday, his sending of the Holy Spirit. It is our becoming aware of the deeper reality of God, that intrinsic oneness that is at the heart of the Trinity.
In his High Priestly Prayer today, Jesus reveals our vocation, and the vocation of all the baptised: to live as those who have already taken their share in the oneness of God, and who proclaim that unity for which Christ prays in the way we live in God’s creation now: surrounded and sustained by the glory and oneness of God.
That may be something to ponder in this prayerful time. How am I being called to manifest the oneness of God in my own life, and in my own relationships? Amen.