7th Sunday of Easter 2024
Acts 1:15-17, 20-26; 1 John 4:11-16; John 17:11-19
To an extent, we are in a similar situation to the disciples in today’s First Reading. It is the time between Ascension and Pentecost. Christ has returned to the Father, and we await the coming of the Holy Spirit. What then did the disciples do at this point?
According to St. Luke, both in His Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles, they did a great deal. After the “two men in white” had chased them away from the location of the Ascension with an instruction to stop gawping, they gathered in the Upper Room to pray for the Spirit to descend upon them. They also, at the instigation of Peter, chose a replacement for Judas.
Furthermore, according to St. Luke’s Gospel, they spent a lot of time in the Temple, praising God because they were full of joy. What they did not do, as I never tire of pointing out, was to hide away in fear: that was an aspect of the immediate aftermath of Calvary, and it came to an end with the appearances of the risen Christ.
What then should we be doing, disciples in the twenty first century? We should be full of joy, we should praise God, and we should pray for the Holy Spirit to come upon us anew. And don’t forget something which we were told last week, and which has been emphasised again today: we should love one another.
I don’t think that it is possible to overstate the importance of praying for a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit. As Our Lord Himself taught us, it is the Spirit who gives life. The Spirit hovered over the chaos at Creation, and brought it into life; and that same Spirit, proceeding from the Father and the Son, continues to give life. The Spirit gives life to the created world, to the Church, to us as individuals and as members of the Church, and to every man and woman on the face of the earth, if only they are open to receiving that life.
Surely the need is great today to pray for creation, that it may yet be rescued from what St. Paul calls its bondage to decay, from the destruction wrought by human exploitation and human greed. There is a need to pray for those people who resist the promptings of the Spirit, and who seek instead to dominate others by force, fear, or lies, whether at international, national, or domestic level.
We need to pray also for a new outpouring of the Spirit on the Church, that members of the Church may cease to pursue their own agendas, that they may open themselves to being led by the Spirit, guided by the Pope whom God has given us, and who is so clearly a man of the Spirit. And we need to pray for ourselves, that each one of us may be filled with the Holy Spirit to play our own part in building the Kingdom of God.
Prayer for the Church and for the members of the Church is the essence of today’s Gospel, which is part of what is commonly known as the High Priestly Prayer of Jesus. St. John sets it in the context of the Last Supper, an appropriate location as Jesus there exercised His priesthood, that priesthood which remains for ever. There He was both priest and victim, offering Himself to the Father, consecrating bread and wine to be His Body and Blood in anticipation of His complete self-offering on the Cross, leaving that Body and Blood as the perpetual memorial and presence of that one perfect sacrifice.
As Jesus consecrates Himself—makes Himself a sacred offering—so He prays that His disciples too may be consecrated in the truth, that they too may be victims consecrated to the Father in the truth that is Christ Himself. Annoyingly, today’s Gospel extract ends one verse early. In the very next verse (v20) Jesus goes on to say “Not for these alone do I pray, but for those also who believe in me through their word”. In other words, you and I, and the whole Church throughout the ages are brought into Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer: whatever He says about those at table, He says about us as well. We too are consecrated in the truth, sharing as priest and victim in the self-offering of Jesus Himself, all of this to happen through the power and inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
So these days between Ascension and Pentecost are busy days. They are days of rejoicing, days for prayer, days to be open. We pray for the Spirit to come anew upon us and upon the world. We pray that we may be consecrated in the truth with all God’s people, that we may, with Christ, be both priest and victim both in the Mass and in the whole of our lives, through the power of the Holy Spirit.
