Only love abides again

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

Today’s gospel (John 17: 20-26) repeats the gospel of last Thursday when the reflection observed that its subject matter could not be exhausted, and here we are again, bowing our heads necessarily before the enormity of the mystery of God. That the love with which the Father has loved the Son may be in us.

Human beings are sensitive to repetition but our relationship to it is complex. The expression “vain repetition” comes from the gospel when Jesus condemns the prayers of the pagans as babbling. I call that interreligious realism on our Lord’s part. But my point is that repetition is not in itself vain. How many times did Jesus Himself need to repeat things to his apostles? This was not vain repetition but pedagogical realism: repetition is the mother of learning.

And yet repetition is also something else as well: it is in some ways the tick of the inner clock of a living cosmos. The earth repeats its ritual circling of the sun, like an ancient worshipper whirling around its deity. The sun itself makes a repeated appearance over the horizon every morning or, to be more precise, the earth again spins us around on an axis that revolves like the central hub of a roundabout. Chesterton celebrates this repetition as a proof of the excess of divine joy. Like a child who demands to be pushed on a swing again and again, or to be hurled up in the air in the arms of its father, so the joy of God overflows into His creation, saying again and again to the sun, “Do it again.” And here again, we might detect an echo of this gospel: that the love with which the Father has loved the Son may be in us.

We see this repetition in the liturgy. In the rite of Holy Mass, the priest makes one solemn sign of the cross over the gifts, but in the old rite, the priest makes repeated signs of the cross throughout the Offertory and Eucharistic prayer, over host, over chalice, and then, over them both, finally tracing the sign of the cross with the host over the top of the chalice, festooning as it were the sacrificial oblata with the mystical joy that unites the Eucharistic species to the bloody offering of Calvary. We still see some of these rituals in the Eastern liturgies: that the love with which the Father has loved the Son may be in us.

Meaningful repetition is then my point, for how can even begin to approach a limitless mystery within the confines of narrow time, narrow space, and narrow human minds? The repetitions, the daily exercises prepare our wills and hearts to follow, and by God’s blessing, we hope He will move His gifts within us, in us the Pentecost children, to speak a prayer back to the Father with unutterable groanings like St Paul: that the love with which the Father has loved the Son may be in us.

The road goes ever on and on, down from the dawn where it began – as Tolkien wrote, never realising that some of his words of wisdom would one day find their way into a papal encyclical, as they did yesterday. But we make our way along a road likewise by repetition, the repetition of placing one foot in front of another, first left, then right, capturing the joy of the traveller, the joy perhaps of a shepherd heading to Bethlehem or a tardy disciple chasing the dust stirred up by the apostolic road trip, stepping always – we hope – towards that mystery that calls us home continually so that the love with which the Father has loved the Son may be in us.

Centuries ago, Christianity in the west made its first misstep when religion came to be seen less as a pilgrimage and more as a fine art. Thus spoke Christopher Dawson in his essay Progress and Religion. It is not fine novelty that we need, or pretentions to discovering something new that nobody else has hitherto realised; we do not need to multiply new beginnings. Rather, we need to pursue with dogged fidelity the same reality again and again, going deeper every time, the repetition being the honour human weakness pays to the imitation of the inimitable one: Jesus, in whose image we are remade by grace that the love with which the Father has loved the Son may be in us.

And so, finally comes the point, as Jesus explains in this passage again, as He had explained it before:

I desire, the Lord says, that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.

Joy awaits those whom He takes with Him. And He takes with Him those who surrender to Him their all, their yes and their thanks, like Mary His Mother. And He in return does not promise to make us happy in this life, but plants in the soil of our every pain the seeds of the unending joy of His Father: that the love with which the Father has loved the Son may be in us also.