Reflection on the Ascension of the Lord/Seventh Sunday of Easter

The section of John’s Gospel that we have just heard is part of what we know as the “last discourse,” Jesus’ words and his prayer at the Last Supper, when he knows the end is near. We know that John is writing this Gospel several decades after Jesus died. John has had years of living within this new community called Christian. He has no doubt pondered deeply his years with Jesus and has absorbed much of what Jesus taught and how he lived. So, we can think of these chapters of John’s Gospel not as a transcript of what Jesus said aloud at the Last Supper, but as a gathering together of what Jesus believed and what he prayed and much of what he passed on to his friends.

In today’s Gospel section, John has Jesus praying to the one Jesus called Father. He has been praying for his disciples and now he is praying for all those who will believe in him because of what the disciples tell them. ”I pray for those who will believe in me through these disciples’ words.” And then he prays “so that all may be one.” I doubt that Jesus had any idea that people like us 2,000 years after he lived would be listening to his ideas and striving to live them out. But he does pray “for those who will believe” in him through his disciples’ word. That is who we are. We came to believe in Jesus through Scripture and the Christian community in which we live. We came to know Jesus through his disciples’ word.

 As John pondered what he and the others had learned from Jesus, he says even more. Jesus’ prayer as presented by John continues: “I made your name known to them so that the love with which you loved me may be in them.” It is Jesus’ prayer to the one he called Father, Abba: that these disciples come to know themselves loved by God. He wants the disciples to experience what he knows: that God permeates his life in all its dimensions. Jesus lived his life, aware of that love and pouring it out on others around him.

We don’t really know what all this means. But somehow we know it’s true.  And we need to live our lives as though we know it’s true. We need to live our lives convinced that this God of ours permeates all that is — permeates the distant stars and galaxies and permeates every leaf on all the trees that are so magnificent this spring. We have to believe that we are one with all that is. We need to acknowledge that, with Jesus, we are this universe shot through with divinity, immersed in the holy, grounded in God.  

Do we understand all this? No. Do we have an awareness of this reality that in faith we hold to be true? Maybe sometimes. Do we keep on keeping on, trying to live the way Jesus did? Yes. The language may seem obscure sometimes. Even to speak of God, of Father, Mother, Source of all being, Allah, can seem obscure as humanity gropes for ways to express a reality we cannot fully grasp.

But the glimpses we do have, the moments of awareness inside us, the word we read or hear that grabs our attention for a brief time — all these hints call us to go beyond ourselves. In John’s language we, with Jesus, are asked to continue to reveal God’s name to others so that love may permeate all that is even more — because of us. In other languages, we could say we are called to a place deep within ourselves where we realize more surely our oneness with each human being, with each plant and animal, with each molecule throughout the universe. We realize this oneness because we know, though darkly and obscurely, that the entire universe and each of us is permeated with God without whom nothing is.  

We respond to these hints about our reality with gratitude and, hopefully, with love and compassion toward all that is. We now move into Eucharist, into an expression of our oneness with Jesus and with all that is.