Bishop Robert Barron Gospel Reflection

Seventh Sunday of Easter

John 17:20-26

Friends, in today’s Gospel Jesus prays for our unity with him and for us to be immersed in God’s love. “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.”

We are not simply supplicants or penitents, calling to God from without; we are sons and daughters, friends, calling to him from within. The Paschal Mystery is intelligible only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity. God so loved the world that he sent his only Son, even to the limits of godforsakenness, even into sin and death, into the darkest corners of human experience, in order to find us.

But this acrobatic act of love is possible only if there is in the very being of God a sender and one that he can send, only if there is a Father and a Son. The language Jesus uses—”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”—shows us that the Father and the Son are united in love, and this love is itself the divine life. Thus there is a Spirit, coequal to the Father and the Son.