Reflection on the Daily Readings for 5/26/09 by Fr. Bertrand Buby, SM

Today’s Readings

Scripture: Tue. of 7th week of Easter. Acts 20:17-27. Psalm 68:10-11.20-21.
John 17:1-11. Lectionary # 298:

Jesus prays!  We are given his intimate and profound prayer that
unites him to the Father through the Spirit they have as their Love.
Throughout the rest of this week we will be gifted with listening to his
prayer that he gives on the last evening of his life among his apostles.
He prays and they listen for he shares his intimacy with God with them as
his friends.  We are led to reflect on this priestly prayer of Jesus and to
model our own prayer upon it. We enter through prayer with Jesus' words
into the mystery of his intimate union of love  with his Father.

Jesus speaks while looking up to the heavens and addressing God as
his Father. Gestures are important in prayer especially when we join in
with others who are praying or when we are participating in the liturgy.
When alone we may also use gestures such as kneeling, standing, lifting up
of our hands. Even sitting and contemplating in silence are excellent ways
of prayer.  We are led to absorb the prayer of Jesus as we read it or hear
it from John's Gospel.  We realize there is no explicit "Lord's Prayer" in
John but the phrases and thoughts expressed by the traditions of the Lord's
Prayer are there.  It is Matthew, Luke, and the Didache or the Teaching of
the Twelve that give us slightly different forms of the Our Father.  In
chapter seventeen we are at the heart of Jesus' prayer and we can easily
put on the mind of Christ as Paul did when we pray this chapter. Paul, of
course, has this spirit of Christ in all of his writings and in what the
Acts of the Apostles tell us about him these days in the liturgical
readings.

We are not orphans. Jesus prays with us for he has chosen us from the
world: "For these I pray...for those you have given me...they have believed
you sent me...I entrusted the message and they received it. They have known
in truth that I came from  you; they have believed you sent me. I pray also
for those who will believe in me through their word."  (John 17:7-9, 14).
Amen.