Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Josép Martinez-Cubero, OHC
Easter 7 B - Sunday, May 16, 2021
Today’s gospel lesson is considered by many scholars to be the highest level of mystical teaching in the entire New Testament. Jesus’ “High Priestly Prayer” in John’s Gospel is the culmination of his farewell discourse to his disciples and a beautiful prayer for unity with evocative language and complex imagery. The setting is the Upper Room following the Last Supper. Jesus has just washed his disciples’ feet. He has foreseen Judas’s betrayal and has predicted Peter’s denial. He has given his disciples some words of instruction and has promised them the Holy Spirit.
The seventeenth chapter of the Gospel begins by saying that Jesus “looked up to heaven and said: ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you.’” “Jesus looked up to heaven.” What does that really mean? I want to propose that something much more significant is taking place in this scene than Jesus’ eyes just shifting upward. “Looking up to heaven” means that Jesus’ mind, heart, and consciousness are lifted into that spiritual realm where he is now profoundly at one with God. It is a way of saying that Jesus is entering into the heavenly realm- God’s consciousness, God’s very heart.
I have been most influenced by James Allison, who, in is magnificent essay, “Undergoing Atonement: The Reverse Flow Sacrifice,” links this passage to imagining the rite of atonement in the First Temple. He writes:
"[T]here is the High Priest, in the Holy Place, with us outside, and he is being ministered to by Angels, he is communing with the Angels who were with YHWH at the beginning of creation. He is spending time in prayer, for it is during this period that he will expect to become interpenetrated by YHWH whom he is going to incarnate for the rest of the rite. So he will pray to become one with God, and that God will become one with him, so that he can perform the sacrifice and glorify God by making God’s people one. This is what At-one-ment is all about. Experts in these matters have long known that in John 17, where Jesus engages in a long prayer concerning the Father being in him, and he in the Father, and him praying that his disciples may be ‘made one’, we have the essence of the High Priestly prayer in the Atonement rite.”
Jesus prays: “I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word.” In the idiom of the Hebrew world, the “name” of God equals the essence of God. That is why we pray, “Hallowed be your name.” Jesus has made known the divine being. He has given to his disciples “the word,” the revelation of who God is, the revelation that God has given him. The disciples would have understood that the word of God is the revelation of the being of God. The call of Jesus for us all is into a new being in which a new dimension of life is entered and through which a transcendent unity is experienced.
“And now I am no longer in the world,” Jesus says. It is clear that the gospel writer is not composing these words in the pre-crucifixion span of time, but in the time for which this book was written. In that later time the Johannine community is in the world. So he prays for them: “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.” In other words, Jesus has opened a door for them into the essence of God. He asks that God keeps them in that essence now that he will no longer be physically with them. They have come to a new understanding of what it means to be human. They are, therefore, different, and the world will always hate that which it sees as different.
“I am not asking you to take them out of the world,” Jesus continues, “but I ask you to protect them from the evil one.” According to biblical scholar, Sandra M. Schneiders, I.H.M., “world” in John’s Gospel means “a construction of reality, which is in opposition to Jesus and his own and which can be incarnated in multifarious ways… [T]his evil world pervades the natural and historical world in which we live, the good Creation of God and the struggling human beings who are torn between good and evil.”
Jesus is not asking for a physical protection, but for a grounding and constant re-centering in God’s consciousness which is what gives us the strength to walk through pain and danger without falling apart. When we are truly grounded in God, nothing that is outside of us can finally destroy us. We are connected to that which is ultimately real and ultimately eternal. Just as Jesus was made whole and holy and set free to give his life away in love, so are his disciples, and us, to be made whole and holy and be set free to give our lives away in love."
“Sanctify them in the truth.” Jesus prayed for what the Eastern Fathers of the Church later came to speak of as “theosis,” God drawing us toward deeper intimacy, and union. This union with God is not merely a place we go to after our earthly life if we are good, but a place of deep goodness in which we naturally exist. And we experience this divine indwelling by “looking up to heaven” in prayer. In other words, Jesus modeled for us this “at-one-ment,” the lifting up of mind, heart and consciousness into the spiritual realm where we are profoundly at one with God.
This idea that the Creator of the Cosmos resides within our being was not unfamiliar in the first century. In John’s Gospel, Jesus is the temple (John 2:19). Writing at an earlier time to the Corinthians, Saint Paul declares that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19). We are reminded to come to this awareness when at the beginning of the Eucharistic Prayer we are asked to lift up our hearts, and we reply that: “we lift them up to the Lord.”
So, why do we pray? I pray because Jesus looked up to heaven and prayed. Love come down prayed. The Word made flesh prayed. May we continue to lift up our hearts to be in communion with that Source of all love. And may that Source of all love keep us ever aware of our connectedness with all that is, that we may always seek the best for all of creation.
¡Que así sea en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo!
Amen+
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