4 June 2019
Tuesday of the Seventh Week of Easter
In his priestly prayer in John 17:1-11a, Jesus asks the Father to give glory to his Son so that the Son might give eternal life to all those whom the Father has given the Son. In essence, the Son asks the Father to bring about in time what the Son already shares with the Father in eternity: “now glorify me, Father, with you, with the glory that I had with you before the world began.” In the Son, the infinite, eternal life of God is perfectly revealed and fully offered to us in the finitude and limitation of a human life. It is not by trying to escape from the bounds of time and space that we share in the life of Christ that is offered to us, but by embracing them and the dramatic unfolding of God’s will for us that takes place in the human life that he offers us.
In this life already, Jesus offers us a share in everything that is his, for he says to the Father about the ones whom the Father gives him: “they are yours, and everything of mine is yours and everything of yours is mine, and I have been glorified in them.” But what does it mean for the Son to be glorified in us. Accoding to saint Irenaus, “the glory of God is the living man, and the life of man is the vision of God” (AH, 4, 20, 7); for more on this see https://www.magisspirituality.org/ignatian_reflection/17-05-11/. Jesus reveals to us God’s own life through his life among us, so that we might no longer strive after the vain lives offered to us by the false gods of this world. Instead, “this is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God, and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ.”