Lectio Divina: A Meditation on the Gospel for Sunday

With the Gospel reading from the upcoming Sunday Mass as its principal source-text, each Lectio Divina (“Sacred Reading”) essay offers a prayerful meditation of the Sacred Scriptures—one which draws from the wealth of biblical literature, as well as the prayer life of the individual author.

On the day before he was to suffer, “Jesus raised his eyes to heaven and said, ‘Father, the hour has come. Give glory to your son, so that your son may glorify you, just as you gave him authority over all people, so that your son may give eternal life to all you gave him.’”

Thus begins Jesus’ high priestly prayer, which follows an exhortation to the apostles and immediately precedes his agony in Gethsemane. In John’s Gospel, Jesus gives his last extended discourse as a prayer to the Father. This is unsurprising, yet perhaps it should be. Jesus, the incarnate Word, is God, so he did not need to pray. Jesus’s divinity provides Saint Thomas Aquinas with a key interpretive insight, “our prayer arises solely from our needs, while the prayer of Christ is more for our instruction” (Commentary on John).

How, then, does this prayer instruct us? It gives us a glimpse of Jesus’ relationship to the Father and shows us how he brings men and women to the Father.

As the Son of God, Jesus shares in the divinity of the Father, yet his humanity is like our own. In his humanity, Jesus received gifts from the Father. The Father “gave him authority over all people” as a man, and in the hour of his sacrifice on the cross he used that authority to glorify the Father by saving all of mankind from death. The Word became flesh to give us eternal life.

Jesus continues, “now this is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God, and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ.” Knowledge of the Trinity is more than the ability to recite lines from the Creed. Knowing unites the object that is known to our mind, so that in knowing God, our minds participate in God and we become like him. Commenting on this verse, Saint Cyril of Alexandria compares this kind of knowledge with Holy Communion. The Eucharist, “by which we are joined to the living and life-giving word,” nourishes our knowledge of God.  “Knowledge, then, is life that also brings the blessing of the Spirit. He dwells in our heart, reshaping those who receive him into adopted children and remolding them into incorruption and piety through the gospel way of life.” Receiving Jesus makes us like Jesus. 

“I glorified you on earth by accomplishing the work that you gave me to do. Now glorify me, Father, with you, with the glory that I had with you before the world began.” In teaching the simple, healing multitudes, forgiving sins, eating, breathing, drinking, suffering, blessing, Jesus did the Father’s will and accomplished the work the Father gave him to do. His life culminated in sacrifice, a sacrifice that took away the sins of the world. In turn, the Father glorified Jesus in raising him from the dead and in receiving Jesus’ body into heaven. Now he sits at the right hand of the Father in glory.

“I revealed your name to those whom you gave me out of the world. They belonged to you, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything you gave me is from you, because the words you gave to me I have given to them, and they accepted them and truly understood that I came from you, and they have believed that you sent me.”

The Father gave everything to Jesus in his humanity, and the disciples heard that Jesus’s words are greater than the words of any other man because they come from the Father. We truly understand that Jesus came from the Father when we realize that Jesus is united with the Father as his image and icon. He is distinct from the Father, but in his divinity Jesus is like the Father in every way and forms a perfect image of the Father. As one “sees through” icons to the eternal image they represent, we see the Father through Jesus. He makes the invisible Father visible. He told the apostles, “he who has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9). Jesus’s words and acts reveal the Father’s love and glory through his union with the Father. 

Jesus’s humanity is essential for our own relationship with the Father. By becoming a man, the Son was one with us while remaining one with the Father. Consequently, he can pray as a mediator, “I pray for them. I do not pray for the world but for the ones you have given me, because they are yours, and everything of mine is yours and everything of yours is mine, and I have been glorified in them. And now I will no longer be in the world, but they are in the world, while I am coming to you.”

Jesus has ascended to the Father. Those men and women whom the Father gave him remain on Earth, yet he has not left us as orphans. Jesus “is able for all time to save those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.” (Heb 7:25) In heaven, Jesus keeps everyone whom the Father gave him, and he brings them to the Father. The liturgy reflects Christ’s mediation, for our prayers are constantly made to the Father in these or similar words: “Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit…”

In his humanity, Christ our mediator made us his brothers, and he enables us to call his Father our Father. He desires to give us the knowledge of the Father that gives us the same unity with the Father unto eternal life. Jesus is no longer walking in the world, but we are. Our lot, then, is to ask for the grace to become like Jesus, that we too may come to the Father.

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Photo by Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P. (used with permission)