Contemplating today's Gospel
Today's Gospel + homily (in 300 words)
What will happen to me there I do not know, except that in one city after another the Holy Spirit has been warning me that imprisonment and hardships await me. Yet I consider life of no importance to me, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to bear witness to the Gospel of God's grace. «But now I know that none of you to whom I preached the kingdom during my travels will ever see my face again. And so I solemnly declare to you this day that I am not responsible for the blood of any of you, for I did not shrink from proclaiming to you the entire plan of God».
Blessed day by day be the Lord, who bears our burdens; God, who is our salvation. God is a saving God for us; the Lord, my Lord, controls the passageways of death.
I revealed your name to those whom you gave me out of the world. They belonged to you, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything you gave me is from you, because the words you gave to me I have given to them, and they accepted them and truly understood that I came from you, and they have believed that you sent me. I pray for them. I do not pray for the world but for the ones you have given me, because they are yours, and everything of mine is yours and everything of yours is mine, and I have been glorified in them. And now I will no longer be in the world, but they are in the world, while I am coming to you.”
“Father, the hour has come”
Fr. Pere OLIVA i March (Sant Feliu de Torelló, Barcelona, Spain)Today, St. John's Gospel —that we have been reading for days now— begins by speaking of “the hour”: “Father, the hour has come” (Jn 17:1). The crowning moment, the clarification of everything, the utmost donation of Christ who delivers himself to all... But “the hour” still is a hidden reality to men; it will be revealed as the scheme of Jesus' life will open the perspective of the Cross.
Has the hour come? What hour? Well, the hour when men will recognize God's name, that is, his actions, his way to address Mankind, his way to speak to us; in the Son, in the Christ He loves.
Now a day, men and women know God through Jesus “the words you gave to me I have given to them” (Jn 17:8), we become witnesses of life, of the divine life developing inside us thanks to the Baptism. In him, we live, we move, we are; in him, we find words that feed us and make us grow; in him, we discover what God wants out of us: our plenitude, our human realization, an existence that does not live out of personal vainglory but out of an existential attitude that becomes strong through the same God and his Glory. As St. Irenaeus remind us, “The Glory of God is living man.” Let us exalt and praise God and his glory so that we, human beings, can reach our plenitude!
The Gospel of Jesus Christ marks us; we work for the glory of God, a task that translates in a better service for today's men and women's lives. This means working for true human communication, true happiness of the person, to increase the joy of the sad ones, to exert compassion on the needing... In short: open to Life (with capital letters).
For the Spirit, God works inside every human being and lives in the deepest part of the person constantly stimulating everybody to live as per the Gospel values. The Good News is the expression of the liberating happiness He wants to give us.
Thoughts on Today's Gospel
“We are all, therefore, one in the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit; one, I mean, both in identity of mental condition, and also in conformity to the life of righteousness, and in the fellowship of the holy Body of Christ, and in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit” (Saint Cyril of Alexandria)
“Knowing Jesus means knowing the Father; and knowing the Father means entering into real communion with the very Origin of Life, Light and Love” (Benedict XVI)
“Vigilance is ‘custody of the heart,’ and Jesus prayed for us to the Father: ‘Keep them in your name’ (Jn 17:11). The Holy Spirit constantly seeks to awaken us to keep watch. Finally, this petition takes on all its dramatic meaning in relation to the last temptation of our earthly battle; it asks for final perseverance. ‘Lo, I am coming like a thief! Blessed is he who is awake’ (Rev 16:15)” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, Nº 2849)
