In our end is our beginning

A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here. 

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Today’s gospel (John 17: 1-11) is one of the most mysterious, one of the most dazzling, passages in all of the New Testament. In it, we enter into the Sacred Heart, as into some vast cathedral where the soaring vaults carry both the thunder of the organ and the whisper of many prayers. It is hard to condense its content, as we usual do at the start of every reflection. Suffice it to say that we see two things principally: on the one hand, the relationship of the Son to the Father, and on the other, the care of both of them for those they intend to rescue from sin. First, a crucial moment has come in the Incarnation when the Son, who has laid down His glory to become man, will be both humiliated by men and glorified by His Father who is in heaven. Second, we hear then the prayer of Christ interceding for the apostles, his first disciples, and the very stem cell members as it were of His Mystical Body whom He has rescued from the world. Every prayer of the Church since that moment has been so to speak a chorus of, or a participation in, that prayer that Christ offers in that moment to the Father. How still the room must have been as these unforgettable words fell upon their ears! Nothing so sublime and yet nothing so strange and unheard of had yet been uttered in the history of the world as these lines!

The foundation of everything in our religion is found in this passage. First, in the relationship of the Father and the Son between whom of course is found the Holy Spirit, their mutual and eternal love, we find the origin of that source from which, first, Creation and then, later, Salvation, gushes forth. In our end is our beginning, and since God is the origin of all, God could have done nothing greater for us than to have offered us a share in His eternal and communal happiness. It is no wonder that St John is the evangelist that is prefigured as an eagle, for only his gospel gives us these lofty glimpses into the greatest of the mysteries of the faith, unfolding in the ocean of God’s eternal moment. When we speak of the eternal mode for our prayers or our thoughts, we are dipping our toes in that great ocean, even though we remain for now on the shoreline of human history and time.

Then, we come to the second aspect of this gospel: Jesus’ prayers for those the Father had given Him. Please God that we number among those whom Jesus prays for at that moment, for while His sacrifice was offered for all, not all receive His truth and His love, as St John has told us from the very first chapter of the gospel. But note here the emphasis: those who are taken to the bosom of the Father by the Son are a gift from the Father to the Son. They are part of an eternal exchange of love. The dignity and the glory of those who enter His happiness are summed up in this: that as the Father communicates everything to the Son, so He restores through the Son’s prayer His wayward creatures to this ever-living and unstoppable cascade of divine self-giving. Here, our vocation is universal: to be in our own particular way one small reflection of that unified light and life of the Living God whose very being is love poured out.

The only response befitting such revelation is that great silence of heaven retold in the Book of Revelation at the start of Chapter 8. Lost in wonder, all we can do is wish to echo the prayer of the Son’s Sacred Heart, and speak our love, our 'yes' and our 'thank you' with Mary, back into the eternal harmony that lies between Father, Son and Holy Spirit: their gift to us the life in which to share; their gift to us the means by which to share that life.

In our end is our beginning, but in their love lies our end. Pray for us, dear Sacred Heart, that we may be yours and the Father’s for ever and ever. Amen.