Dear Sisters, dear brothers and sisters in Christ; once again we are in the Novena for Pentecost, and in particular the Sunday within the Novena. For that reason, the Church presents to us each year on this Sunday a different excerpt from chapter 17 of St John’s Gospel which has been rightly called our Lord’s ‘Priestly Prayer’. It is truly right and just that on the Lord’s Day we should listen to our Lord’s own Prayer of Consecration at the Last Supper. One of the first things we note is that each time we read an extract from this long chapter, we repeat at the beginning the same words which open that chapter, ‘raising His eyes to heaven, Jesus said, “Father…”’.
The whole of the mystery of Christ’s work on earth can be summed up in this prayer of consecration, uttered by our Lord alone after all else has fallen silent, uttered as He offers Himself to the Father in anticipation of the offering He will accomplish on the morrow. He is the priest, indeed the only priest of the new and eternal covenant. When we pray the Mass, the central point is the Eucharistic Prayer, the Great Prayer as it is called in the Christian East, which is modelled on this prayer of Christ the High Priest. Like our Lord Himself, in the Canon of the Mass the priest who stands in persona Christi, at the beginning of the narration of the Last Supper consecration of the bread and the wine, raises his eyes to heaven in imitation of our Lord, before he goes on to speak those wonderful and extraordinary words: ‘take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my Body which will be given up for you,’ and ‘take this, all of you, and drink of it, for this is the chalice of my Blood, the Blood of the New and Eternal Covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many, for the forgiveness of sins; do this in memory of me.’
The Body which will be given up, that is, handed over; and the Blood which will be poured out, as into a vessel for us to drink from; these together are our Paschal Lamb of sacrifice. It is at this wonderful time of the year that we celebrate the Pasch of Christ, which so far surpasses the Pasch of the Old Testament, as His priesthood surpasses that of Aaron and Levi and their successors.
In the passage of chapter 17 which we read today, the final section of the chapter, the prayer comes to a climax. Jesus prays to His ‘righteous Father’, not only for those who hear these words for the first time, but for all those who, through hearing their preaching of His word, will come to faith in Him. How wonderful it is to know that He is not only present to us when His word is solemnly read at Mass, but that He already had us in mind, us who are here today, when He uttered that prayer the first time. He had us in His heart even before we were made. He longed for our time to come so that He might bring us to Himself, unite us to Himself, fill us with His joy and with His Holy Spirit.
How wonderful it is to realise that these words: ‘Righteous Father,…I have made your name known to these and will continue to make it known, so that the love with which you loved me may be in them, and so that I may be in them’, these words, I say, are spoken for us to hear. We are those to whom our Lord makes His Father’s name known. He not only makes it known once, but, as He says, He continues to do so. He does this ‘so that the love with which you loved me may be in them’. This love with which the Father loves the Son, and with which the Son loves His Father in perfect return, is the love which is God Himself, the Holy Spirit of God, the bond of love. Our Lord, then, is praying the Father that the self-same love which they share, which is the Holy Spirit in person, may be in us, too. Our Lord’s prayer is that out of this love which they share, they may actually come to dwell in us, and that the Spirit may make both the Son and the Father known to us.
How wonderful, too, it is to realise that the Son of God is praying that by means of the Holy Spirit entering into us, He too may enter into us and so therefore the Holy Trinity may make His dwelling in us and share His life, His knowledge, and His love with us!
Whilst we can only stop in awe at the very thought of this, we must also remember that this is only the beginning. The prayer our Lord offers is not only for us, His followers, here and now, but looking beyond the end of this life towards eternal beatitude. It is the thought of this love that can have only one end: the desire for it to be increased. For there is always more of what God is and what He offers us.
This leads to the point that St John wrote not only the fourth Gospel but also three epistles which we are reading at this time in the Office of Readings, and the Apocalypse, from the end of which our second reading comes this morning. This passage relays the words which our Lord addresses to John at the conclusion of the long series of visions of the future, as He proclaims: ‘Behold, I am coming soon, my reward is with me to repay according to every man’s work.’ The Lord whom the Apostles saw visibly taken from them at the Ascension, is the One who, the angels told them, ‘will return as you have seen Him go,’ not to offer Himself as Priest and victim, but to judge in righteousness. This righteousness is the Father’s infinite holiness and justice without attaining which no one will enter the kingdom of heaven. This is why our Lord addresses His Father as ‘righteous One’ in today’s passage from the Priestly Prayer. He also makes manifest to John His own status upon entering into heavenly glory as man: ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.’ We heard those words as the Paschal Candle was blessed and signed with its defining marks at the opening of the Easter Vigil. We also remember that when He comes again it will be as Judge to reward each one according to his deeds in the life, and that He will come as the bright morning star. Now that star is the sun, which rises in the East, just as we hear in the Benedictus canticle, ‘by the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will bless us.’ Jesus is the morning star, the rising sun, the living Paschal Candle that enlightens us all.
Yet as we long for His coming again, and as we pray to be ready to greet Him then, we draw strength from the fact that He has given us His Spirit in order to enable us to make this simple yet profound prayer: ‘Come!’ For when we know not how to pray, the Spirit Himself prays on our behalf and within our hearts, in words too deep for us to grasp fully, but meaning just this: ‘Come!’ This is the meaning of those repeated words at the final verses of the Apocalypse, showing the final glimpse of Him who is to come: ‘The Spirit and the Bride, that is the Church, together say to the Lord, ‘Come!’ Let everyone who hears these words answer (as though to intensify the call): ‘Come!’ Let all who thirst for righteousness come and drink the water that is the Holy Spirit poured out on those who thirst. The one who testifies to these words is Christ. He witnesses to their truthfulness, because He is Truth in person. He answers the prayer of the Spirit and the Bride, replying to them, ‘Indeed, I come quickly.’ As we await the renewal of the gift of the Spirit and the deepening of His life of prayer in us, we pray with longing to our Lord in the language of the earliest Christians, ‘Amen. Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!’
On Maundy Thursday, when we celebrated the Mass commemorating that night on which our Lord made His great prayer of consecration to the Father, we sang the hymn Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est, which concludes with this prayer which we may well make our own at this time, too:
‘So may we be gathered once again, beholding
Glorified the glory, Christ, of Thy unveiling;
There, where never-ending joys, and never failing
Age succeeds to age eternally unfolding.’ Amen.
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