Scripture: lectionary 62. 7th Sunday after Easter. Acts 7:55-60. Psalm 97:1-2,6-7,9. Rev. 22:12-14.16-17.20. John 17:20-25:

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We all know and sing the church song Amazing Grace.  Today John’s Gospel has Jesus giving us Amazing Love that surpasses any love that has ever burned in the human heart.  The passage confirms Jesus’ infinite, intimate, and everlasting love for us and tells us that this is the very love that he shares with the Father!  This passage prepares us for the supreme gift of love, the Holy Spirit, who is the person-love between the Father and the Son.  The whole of chapter 17 is the testament of love, the covenant of love, and the intimate love called Agape for all who trust and believe in Jesus and the love he manifests to us through his human heart received from Mary his mother.  We are overwhelmed by this love through our contemplation, prayer, and reflection of this divine-human love coming from the heart of the one who has lived out the greatest story ever told.

No one has ever been able to have such love for us as Jesus does. He even prays for us through his prayer for his disciples: “I do not pray for my disciples alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their word; that all may be one as you, Father, are in me and I in you; I pray that they may be one in us, that the world may believe that you sent me…So that the world may know that you sent me, and that you loved them as you loved me.” (John 17:20-21,23cd).

This passage helped me realize that such intimate and absolute love is essentially the same love that Jesus has for his Father and then gives that love to us.  The gift of faith in Jesus leads us to such love.  I have learned that Jesus is the Apostle who has been sent to share the divine love he has with his Father with us.  With the coming of the Holy Spirit we receive that love. The Holy  Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son. We are summoned to share the very love the Holy Spirit is.  The Spirit dwells within our human hearts and is manifested in the words and actions we have seen in Jesus.  I pray that the Father’s love for Jesus may live within us and that we may live in that love through the Holy Spirit.  “Come, Holy Spirit, enkindle in us the fire of your divine love.” Amen.

Copyright 2013 Fr. Bertrand Buby, S.M.