Scott Hahn with David Scott
Jesus is praying for us in today’s Gospel. We are those who have come to believe in Him through the Word of the Apostles, handed on in His Church.
Jesus showed the Apostles His glory, made known the Father’s name, and the love He has had for us from “before the foundation of the world.” He revealed that He and the Father are one (see John 14:9).
Jesus is the “first and the last” (see Isaiah 44:6), the root of David (see Isaiah 11:10; 2 Samuel 7:12), as today’s Second Reading declares. Wrapped in clouds and darkness as God was at Sinai (see Exodus 19:16), He is “the king…the Most High over all the earth,” as we sing in today’s Psalm.
Exalted at God’s right hand, as Stephen sees in the First Reading, the Lord calls to us through the Church, His Bride.
He calls us to “the tree of life,” to communion with God. This is the goal of His love, His saving purpose from all eternity – that each of us enter into the life of Blessed Trinity, be “brought to perfection as one” with the Father and Son in the Spirit.
The story of Stephen, the first martyr, shows us how we are to answer His call. Listen for the echoes of the crucifixion: Stephen, like Jesus, sees the Son of Man in glory and dies with words of forgiveness and self-offering on his lips (compare Acts 7:56-60; Matthew 26:64-65; Luke 23:24, 46).
We, too, are to commend our spirits to the Father, to pray and offer our lives in love for our brethren, awaiting His coming in judgment. We renew our vows in every Mass, coming forward to receive the gift of His life.
We answer His call by crying out a call of our own: “Amen! Come, Lord Jesus!”
And in our communion we answer our Lord’s prayer: “That they may all be one, as You, Father are in Me and I in You.”
Guigo II the Carthusian from Meditation 10 (SC 163, p. 187)
“I wish that where I am they also may be with me”
We must follow Christ, cleaving to him, nor should we forsake him until we die. As Elisha said to his master : “ As the Lord lives and as you yourself live, I will not leave you ” (2 Kgs 2:2)… So let us follow Christ and stay close to him ! “To be near God is my good ” says the Psalmist (73[72]:28). “ My soul clings fast to you ; your right hand upholds me ” (Ps 63[62]:9). And Saint Paul adds : “ Whoever is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him ” (1 Cor 6:17). Not just one body but one spirit. His whole body lives from the spirit of Christ ; through the body of Christ we attain to the spirit of Christ. Remain, therefore, by faith in Christ’s body and you will become one spirit with him. You are already united to his body through faith ; in vision you will also be united to him in spirit. Not that we shall see without a body when we are above, but our bodies will be spiritual (1 Cor 15:44).
“Father,” Christ said : “I pray that they may all be one, as you, are in me and I in you, that the world may believe” : this is what union through faith is. And later he asks: “that they may be brought to perfection as one, that the world may know;” this is union through vision.
This is how we are spiritually nourished on the body of Christ : by having a pure faith in him, by continually seeking the content of this faith in assiduous meditation and in this way discovering with our minds what it is we are looking for, by loving passionately the object of our discovery and imitating, so far as possible, him who we love, and, even as we imitate him, by staying close to him at all times so that we may come to everlasting union with him.
