Seventh Sunday of Easter – Barbara Barry, SNDdeN
June 1, 2025
John 17:20-26
We have come to the last week of the Easter season. It has been a memorable one. While we have mourned the death of Pope Francis, we have also celebrated and are grateful for all that his words and actions have done for the church and the world community. Particularly, this experience of the conclave has been influenced by the extended internationality of the community of cardinals and by the atmosphere of synodality that is growing in the church. We also look forward in hope to all that Pope Leo XIV will inspire in us. He, too, has a focus on the poor and marginalized and a need for peace.
It is quite possible that both of these popes have been influenced by today’s gospel from John. Of course, we know that no one was taking down Jesus’ words that night and we can assume that the apostles were so distracted with what was happening that they weren’t trying to remember what they heard Jesus praying but somehow the oral tradition of the early church recalls this intimate prayer of Jesus with his Abba. In Jesus’ last hours his prayer is “that they (we) may all be one as you are in me and I in you.” This is a hope and desire that leads him to tears in his prayer, for he, too, knew a world torn apart by violence and struggles for power.
Pope Leo’s first words from the balcony were a greeting of peace and in his first weeks he pleads for peace and reconciliation in Gaza, Ukraine, Haiti and so many war-torn countries in our world. He has offered the Vatican as a place of neutrality where dialogue can happen between leaders to bring an end to the violence and death. Pope Francis constantly put before us the importance of encounter. It is in the one to one relationship with others, when we recognize the presence of God in each other, that violence turns to peace.
Today’s gospel is a source of hope. Jesus knows our experience and still believes that we can be one. Let us find hope in this intimate prayer. Let it be our prayer as well. And then let us take seriously our own relationship with God and with one another. Be at peace.
John 17:20-26
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.”
The Gospel of the Lord
Meet Sister Barbara Barry, SNDdeN
