Only love abides

An audio version of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

****

Today’s gospel (John 17: 20-26) continues the priestly prayer of Jesus that we have been listening to throughout the week. Again, we hear its simple but sublime themes rehearsed: the relationship of the Son to the Father, their unity and mutual indwelling so to speak, their life in eternity before the foundation of Creation, the revelation that Jesus is to those to whom the Father sent Him. Increasingly, in this section we see also identified the fruits of the outpouring of the life of the Blessed Trinity on those whom the Father has given to the Son, and now not only their relationship to God, but their relationship with each other because of that God-relationship: that they may be one even as we are one. Yet, being one is only one of the four qualities of being, which is why there can be no unity without truth, no unity without goodness, and no unity that does not let break forth its rays of beauty. And none of those qualities could be what they are without their grounding in the unending love of God, which is why, as this passage concludes, Jesus prays:

That the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.

As in our reflections earlier this week, there are some passages of Scripture that simply require the bowing of our heads and the stilling of our minds. Their enormity is beyond us in our usually busy and accelerated heads. The truths of this passage do not come to us in slow motion; rather they move at the pace of eternal life itself, and that requires something of us summed up in that famous quip:

Don’t just do something, stand there!

Stand and listen, stand and contemplate, stand and receive. The centre of our very being is not where we sought it, not in our inner harmony, nor in our restless perfectionism, not in our successes, and certainly not in our acquisition of pious moods and behaviours that we believe we have paid a stipend for.  The centre of our being is in Him and in Their life.

The centre of our lives is ultimately in the realisation of Jesus’ prayer in us:

That the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.

We are not the end point and could never have been. We are children born into an existing ocean of love, only, for us collectively, that ocean is not bounded by human parents but by the unity of the three Divine Persons whose shared life has broken forth in Creation and our Redemption.

 That the Father’s love may be in us: that is no meditation for one morning’s reflection. It is a mystery that cannot be contained by any humanly imagined bounds. And yet its logic is a golden thread that we must pursue. What would our lives look like if lived by that love? If we allow Jesus’ prayer to be realised in us, how differently would we live?

We might also ask: what in our lives is truly compatible with that love? Have we been faithful to it? Have we sought to trade in currencies that have no part in that love? Have we preferred some other love to His?

We cannot keep ourselves safe in that regard; our fidelity to love must also come from Him. In order to find Him who is All, we must realise that we are as nothing. I write rhetorically of course; we are never nothing. But we are the broken ones who must be mended in the love of the Father who awaits us, ready to place the ring on our finger and hold a feast when we receive again His love.

What can our poor prayers – so broken like ourselves – do for if not echo, therefore, constantly the very petition Jesus has made known to us. Nothing else will matter in eternity: That the love with which the Father has loved the Son may be in each and every one of us. Now and forever. Amen.