Sunday Meditation: One Body

Today is the Seventh and final Sunday of Easter.  Next week the Holy Spirit will descend with Pentecost.  For the Seventh Sunday in Year C, we hear in His Farewell Discourse Christ’s great prayer for unity. 

 

Lifting up his eyes to heaven, Jesus prayed saying:

"Holy Father, I pray not only for them,

but also for those who will believe in me through their word,

so that they may all be one,

as you, Father, are in me and I in you,

that they also may be in us,

that the world may believe that you sent me.

And I have given them the glory you gave me,

so that they may be one, as we are one,

I in them and you in me,

that they may be brought to perfection as one,

that the world may know that you sent me,

and that you loved them even as you loved me.

Father, they are your gift to me.

I wish that where I am they also may be with me,

that they may see my glory that you gave me,

because you loved me before the foundation of the world.

Righteous Father, the world also does not know you,

but I know you, and they know that you sent me.

I made known to them your name and I will make it known,

that the love with which you loved me

may be in them and I in them."

   ~Jn 17:20-26

 

Given that some if not many are celebrating the Solemnity of the Ascension today, while my diocese celebrated it on Thursday, it was a bit hard to find homilies strictly on the Seventh Sunday of Easter.  Here is a new preacher to my blog, Fr. Oliver Keenan OP from Great Britain’s Blackfriars in Oxford.

Notice what Fr. Oliver says: “The visibility of the Church’s unity was the manifestation of the love of God.”  In unity we are “perfected into one.”

For the pastoral homily, I once again go to Fr. Peter Hahn, this from nine years ago.  Apparently nine years ago the Seventh Sunday of Easter fell on Mother’s Day, and Fr. Peter connects the unity that Christ calls for with that of a mother and her child.

I particularly liked the quote and exhortation from Pope Francis. 

Sunday Meditation: “Father, they are your gift to me.  I wish that where I am they also may be with me. "

 

 

For the hymn, how beautiful os John Michael Talbot’s “One Bread, One Body.”

 

“And we, though many, throughout the earth, we are one body in this one Lord.”