On being God's gift

 Today's gospel offers us another extract from St John's account of Jesus' ministry. St John's gospel is in a special way a COLW gospel, because so much of what is close to the heart of COLW - vocation, contemplation, incarnation - is sown throughout it. Today's passage from Chapter 6 reminds us a little of Jesus' priestly prayer in Chapter 17 during the Last Supper because it tells us something of the extraordinary mystery of life that passes between the Father and the Son from eternity. 

All that the Father gives me will come to me,

and whoever comes to me I shall not turn him away;

because I have come from heaven, not to do my own will,

but to do the will of the one who sent me.

Now the will of him who sent me

is that I should lose nothing of all that he has given to me,

and that I should raise it up on the last day.

So many truths of our faith are summed up in these profound lines: the Father's eternal begetting of the Son, the Son's role as high priest of redemption, the submission of the Incarnate Son to His Father, the Divine Will and the resurrection of the dead. Passages like this remind us that the Good News is not primarily a way of life but the reality in which we live (and where we must live the life we are called to). 

T. S. Eliot writes, "Humankind cannot bear too much reality," and he is mostly right. But we need not bear it, so much as open our minds to its power which is the power of the Father who has given us to the Son as His gift. And in opening our minds to its power - through prayer, through the desert we make for ourselves in our hearts amid the busyness of life - we can begin to find our place in His heart, in the world to which He has called us, and in the will of the Blessed Trinity. We need not so much to do His will as to live in it. 

When I was young, one of the more refined insults girls would use about a boy was, "He thinks he's God's gift". The startling truth is that when we surrender to the Father as Christ submitted to Him, He is able to make us a gift to His Son. We become part of a series of gifts whose brightest jewel is of course the Blessed Mother who was given to the Son not only in the moment of her Fiat but in her Immaculate Conception.

May COLW be a little grapevine in your pure hands to quench the thirst of Jesus we pray in the COLW Thanksgiving after Holy Communion. In other words, may the Mother who was Jesus' first gift help us become the gift the Father offers to the Son, so that we may all become one day - that day of the resurrection of the dead - the gift that the Son places back in the bosom of the Father forever.