Seventh Sunday Of Easter (Year A)

Acts 1.12-14;  
I Pet 4.13-16;  
John 17.1-1
This is eternal life: that they know Thee the only true God,
and Jesus Christ whom Thou has sent.
Today’s gospel passage is taken from that great prayer of Our Lord which is known as His Priestly Prayer, in which He addresses His Father in a very moving dialogue in which he, as Priest, prays for Himself and His disciples, and offers to the Father the imminent sacrifice of His passion and death.  
In this prayer, He speaks of His glory, a glory which He has from the Father, a glory which will be revealed on the cross. The word ‘glory’ refers to the splendour, power and honour which belong solely to God. The Old Testament teaches us that the world and everything in it (including humanity) belongs to God, is subject to him.  It is not we who ‘make God up’ or ‘project him’ out of our psychological, economic or social needs; rather it is God who creates and sustains us.

In today’s gospel, Christ through His prayer revealed to us His entire mission. ‘I have glorified you on earth and finished the work that you have me to do’. And now in His death, and then more clearly in His resurrection and ascension, Christ’s divinity is about to be revealed. He has for thirty years voluntarily disguised His divinity, but now that divinity will be manifested through His humanity when the apostles see His glorified body, a body invested with the very authority of God Himself.Through His glorification, He gives mankind the opportunity to attain eternal life, to know God the Father and Jesus Christ, His only Son. But note particularly the verb which Christ uses, the way in which man shares in eternal life: we do so by knowing God. This is eternal life: that they know thee the only true God.

If we want to think correctly about our faith, we have to remember that God is larger than all our thoughts, and yet at the same time never forget that the historical life, death and resurrection of Christ IS the definitive revelation of God. Knowing therefore means doing His will, faithfulness to Him in the midst of trials and a life of kindness towards others. There is no Catholicism without the Incarnation and the sacraments, yet if we cling only to the visible, we leave the way open to a tendency to ignore our own supernatural vocation.  We forget the great lesson of the Old Testament that the earth is the Lord’s and that it is not we who judge and use him, but he who judges and makes use of us.  

In the Old Testament, the glory of God hovered over the people of the covenant, and through them over the whole world.  In the New Testament, this glory shows itself in God’s action in Christ, Who loved His own through all the changes of this troubled life; He loved them in the shadow of death; He loved them on the cross.  This love, which has no limit, and of whose existence no one had any knowledge before Christ is still at work today in the world, in our lives; but we cannot receive it unless we know it as coming from the Holy Spirit -the Author of Sacred Scriptures.

Fr Joseph Osho