In seeking how we should live in our own time, John Paul II followed Jesus by going back to the “the beginning” to learn God’s intention for creation and humanity before sin entered the scene. We read the stories from Genesis in the light of Christ. We learn the significance of our embodied existence and God’s intention that human beings are made for relationships of self-giving love with God and with others, reflecting the life of God as a Trinity of Persons united in self-giving love. While a unique image of such love is the union of husband and wife in marriage, all human beings are called to a right relationship to God and one another.
Yet, human beings sinned and fell from grace. You know how the story goes. As our Book of Common Prayer liturgy puts it: “when we had fallen into sin and become subject to evil and death, you, in your mercy, sent Jesus Christ, your only and eternal son, to share our human nature, to live and die as one of us, to reconcile us to you, the God and Father of all. He stretched out his arms upon the cross, and offered himself, in obedience to your will, a perfect sacrifice for the whole world.” God Himself took on our human nature in Jesus, who had a real body that could really suffer and feel pain. And God loves each of us so much that he offered himself on the cross in self-giving love that his original intention for humanity can be restored in his coming kingdom (which is already at hand, as Jesus proclaimed).
The night before Jesus was crucified, he had a meal with his disciples where he said some remarkable things. First, he gives his disciples something specific to do so that they can always remember the significance of what he was about to do with his real body and real blood. As Luke’s gospel puts it (22:19-20) And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” Jesus entered into real human suffering and died a real human death. Human beings are embodied creatures, and eating and drinking are embodied actions at the heart of the mystery of remembrance that Jesus gave us. He and the redemption he won for us are present to us as we partake of the sacrament of his body and blood.
Secondly, John’s gospel (17:20-26) records Jesus prayer to his Father for his disciples, including all those to come in future generations (us!): “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.” Jesus desires the unity of his followers, just as our first parents experienced an original unity prior to their sin. It is an intimate unity, as Jesus and the Father share with the Spirit. The unity of Jesus and his disciples is for the sake of everyone--those here called the world—those loved by God who do not yet know him but remain lost in their sin. The tragedy of human existence in the world is that we constantly forget that we are made for self-giving love, that we prefer our own ways to the ways of the Father. We do not say like Jesus was to say to his Father in the garden later that Thursday night (Luke 22:42), “not my will, but yours, be done.”
Jesus continues his prayer (17:24-26): “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me. I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” The ultimate destiny of all human beings is in God. Let us all pray that we would see in Jesus the unfathomable love that the Father has for his sick and fallen human creatures. Pray that we will turn from our false and selfish ways and that we may truly know the mystery of the love of God in Christ Jesus—the love for which we were made and without which we can never be complete. It was because of that love that Jesus endured the cross. It was a specially Trinitarian kind of love, for at the end the Son of God yielded his Spirit--his Holy Spirit-- into the hands of his Father.
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