The readings put before us for these last few days remaining before Easterand the celebration of Pentecost this Sunday are distinct.Through Thursday the gospel is taken from John 17, known as the “High Priestly Prayer” of Christ.The Acts moves along with St. Paul rather quickly now to its culmination in Rome, the ‘ends of the earth.’
Today, I would like us to reflect on this prayer Jesus offers for his disciples and ‘all who will believe in [him] because of their word” (v. 20).Let us situate ourselves in order to dwell in the sacredness of these words offered by our Lord to his heavenly Father.Jesus has just now completed his ‘farewell discourse’.The discourse itself, of course, is the culmination of his three years of ministry, beginning with his baptism in the Jordan by John, the calling of the apostles, the first miracle at the Wedding Feast in Cana and the preaching, teaching and works of wonders that followed.He is now on the threshold of the act of love in which he will offer his life in complete fidelity to his Father on the cross of Calvary.He has entrusted everything to his disciples.He has revealed his heart.He has pointed them to the promised Spirit who will ‘seal’ in the very depths of their spirits all that which he has done with them and taught them.And now, in this prayer to the Father, he ‘gathers them up’—and all of us who have come to believe because of their word—and places them into the sovereign hands of God.
At the heart of Jesus’ prayer is the desire that his Father might ‘consecrate his disciples in the truth’ (cf. v. 17). He reminds the Father that he has given to them the Father’s very own word (cf. v. 14).“Your word is truth” (v. 17b).But what is the word?What is the word containing Truth that Jesus has so carefully given over to us, his disciples?Stop a moment. Ask yourself, “What is the word, the Truth that Jesus has given me, has given his People?”We have walked together with Jesus and his disciples now through the 40 days of Lent and nearly all of these 50 days of Easter.What is the word that Jesus desires the Father to consecrate us in?
Jesus says, in verse six, “I revealed your name to those whom you gave me out of the world.”Then in verse eleven he says, “Holy Father, keep them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one just as we are one.”Finally, the ultimate request, offered in the last verse of this chapter 17, “I made known to them your name and I will make it known, that the love with which you loved me may be in them and I in them.”
There it is!The word that is truth!It is none other then the name by which Jesus addresses God and has taught us to address him with—my Father, our Father.This name which is not the name of an ‘individual’ but of a relationship.There is no ‘father’ if there is no ‘son’.To be ‘father’ is to be in relationship with another whom is your ‘son’, your ‘child’.The truth, and this we have already said several times, is that precious and tender name, Father.But the name opens up, by the very nature of the name, to the relationship that exists from all eternity at the very heart of God—the relationship of love between Father and Son.To know this name, to have this name revealed to us is to share, to participate in this very love.It is to be made child before our eternal Father.It is, in other words, to be ‘born again.’To have received the ‘name’ is to receive a new identity, an entirely new structure of relationships—introduced into the eternal relationship of the Trinity and the relationships of brothers and sisters of the baptized—it is to have been given new life.
“And I consecrated myself for them, so that they also may be consecrated in the truth” (v. 18).The consecration which Jesus makes by offering himself on the cross is the consecration in this truth which is precisely the purpose, the very end for which the Holy Spirit is poured out upon us in baptism and confirmation.To seal within the depths of our hearts that we are no longer strangers, no longer solitary individuals, no longer ‘ragamuffins and misfits.’ The Holy Spirit consecrates, seals in the very core of our spirits that we are in fact children of God, brothers and sisters of all the baptized, members of the family of God, participants in the relation of love that is the Son’s and the Father’s from all eternity.