Dear Sisters, dear Brethren in Christ, the Gospel we have just listened to is a remarkable passage by any reckoning. Each year, on the Sunday following the Ascension, we are given a portion of the 17th chapter of St John’s Gospel to hear. Let me briefly introduce this chapter to you in the context of the whole of St John’s Gospel. This Gospel passage marks the climax of our Lord’s Last Supper discourse. The first part of this, beginning in chapter 13, tells of the washing of the feet and continues from there with three more chapters of teaching by our Lord concerning His relations with them, with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Altogether there are no fewer than five entire chapters devoted to one event out of a Gospel consisting of some twenty two chapters in all. From this fact alone we should realise how centrally important the Last Supper was. It was far more than a farewell meal with His friends, it was our Lord’s last Will and Testament or to use another word meaning the same thing as Testament, it was His New Covenant, it contained His final instructions to His apostles before His passion, and of course it was the occasion of the institution of the Mass, of the Blessed Sacrament of Holy Communion and of the sacred priesthood.
Chapter 17 is the final part of all this, and it is well chosen for this Sunday. Let me explain. In this chapter our Lord is no longer speaking to His apostles, but only to His heavenly Father. This is why St John begins so pointedly with the words, ‘When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven…’ These words, when St John uses them of our Lord, often describe a special moment of prayer, when God the Son turns to His Father in heaven in intimate prayer and spiritual communion. We are told that before the feeding of the Five Thousand Jesus did the same, raising His eyes to heaven before praying to the Father. In the Canon of the Mass, just before the Consecration, the narrative of the institution of the Blessed Eucharist opens with these words: ‘On the day before He was to suffer, He took bread in His holy and venerable hands, and with eyes raised to heaven to you, O God, His almighty Father, giving you thanks He said the blessing, broke the bread and gave it to His disciples, saying, “Take this, all of you and eat of it, for this is my Body, which will be given up for you.”’
So the raising up of His eyes to heaven is a sign of raising His heart and soul to the Father in prayer. After the long discourse given to the disciples at the Supper, Jesus now finally turns in prayer to His Father. All is now complete, all His instructions have been finished, and all that remains before He hands Himself over to His Passion is to make this most special prayer to His Father, a prayer which will encapsulate all that His forthcoming Passion and Death will mean and achieve for us. Throughout the Gospels we are told that Jesus would often take Himself off in private to pray, and no one knows what passed between the Father and the Son in those moments of intimacy. But on this occasion we are allowed to listen in as Jesus prays to His Father, both for His own forthcoming passion and for all His followers and indeed for all mankind. It is a wonderful prayer which we are given the enormous privilege to hear. But it is also very long, and we only hear one third of it today. The other two parts will be heard on this Sunday after the Ascension next year and the year after.
So what do we learn from this, the opening part of this great prayer of our Lord? It is, in the first instance, a prayer for glorification. Jesus prays that He may be glorified by His Father, so that He may in turn glorify the Father Himself. Now at last has arrived the hour, the hour for which He has been preparing all His life. At Cana, some three years before, He had said to His blessed Mother: ‘My hour has not yet come’. Well, now it is here. The hour of our Lord is, of course, the hour of His suffering; but not only His suffering, for it is also the hour of His glorification. What is this ‘glorification’? It is to show, even in and through those terrible sufferings he is about to endure, that all this, the agony in the Garden, the arrest and trial, the scourging and the crowning with thorns, the carrying of the cross, the stripping and the nailing and horrible death, are in fact nothing less than the finishing of the work which He has been sent by the Father to do.
In return for enduring all that, the Father will reward the Son with the glory of the resurrection, which is not only in the return to heaven of the Son of God as He always has been for all eternity, but the new entry into heaven of the Son of Man, the Son of Adam, the Son of Mary. In all His years on earth He has already made God known in His teaching, His miracles, His mercy, his parables; now He asks for the glory which He had before the world was made to be given to Him in His sacred human nature too, and to be given Him by means of willingly enduring His Passion for love of the Father and of us.
So He now prays to the Father having manifested or revealed the Father to His disciples. He has shown them that all He is and has done has come from the Father. He has been sent by the Father to complete a vital work – the work of showing who God really is, and of bringing fallen mankind back to unity with God who made man in His own image, who made Him for the purpose of knowing Him, loving Him and serving Him, in order to be happy and glorified in His presence for all eternity in heaven after this life. So it is that our Lord’s prayer to be glorified is also a prayer for us to be glorified. He prays to the Father in these words: ‘I have manifested your name to the men whom you gave me out of the world... Now they know that everything that you have given me is from you; … and they have believed that you did send me. I am praying for them; I am not praying for the world but for those whom you have given me, for they are yours; all mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I am glorified in them.’
This prayer means that we can come to know God insofar as we come to know His Son, Jesus. And we know Jesus by accepting His teaching and putting it into practice. ‘And this is eternal life’, He says, ‘to know you, Father, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.’
He is now about to depart from the world which He entered as man through His Mother’s womb. This prayer is the prelude to that departure and the key to understanding what that departure means. It is about His glory, and ours; His knowledge and love of God, and ours; His going to the Father, and ours. This is why we hear this passage of the Gospel on the Sunday after the Ascension. For Jesus’s entry into heaven which we celebrated last Thursday on Ascension Day, is the opening up of the way to glory for all who belong to our Lord. In the meantime, before He returns to call us to Himself, He prays for us because He will no more be in the world while we ourselves are still in the world.
But if He is not ‘in the world’, does that not mean that He is no longer with us? Has His going to the Father left us like orphans? He has told us that is not the case, because of something of mighty importance and grandeur: it is the pouring out on us of the torrent of life and love that is the Holy Spirit of the Father and the Son. Our Lord has returned in glory to the Father not to separate Himself from us, but to send us the Spirit who will make Him present in a new way. That new presence will give us a joy which no one will take from us, and that outpouring, that new presence, that foretaste of heavenly glory we will once more celebrate anew next Sunday in the magnificent solemnity of Pentecost, the crowning glory of Eastertide and the pledge of future glory for us who belong to Him.
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