LECTIONARY READINGS
First reading: Acts 14:21-27
Responsorial psalm: Ps 144(145):8-13
Second reading: Apocalypse 21:1-5
Gospel: John 13:31-35
Link to readings
The short sequence that makes up the Gospel for today (John 13:31-35) follows immediately on Jesus’ prediction at the Last Supper that Judas will betray him. It may seem surprising that Jesus responds to Judas’ departure on his treacherous errand with what amounts almost to a cry of exaltation: ‘Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him’. The two matters are, however, closely – even causally – connected. Judas’ act of betrayal will trigger the sequence of events that will culminate in Jesus’ public execution upon a cross. In everyday understanding such an end to a human life would be the ultimate in shame and degradation.
In the perspective of the Fourth Gospel, however, it represents the ‘glorification’ of Jesus – and the glorification of the Father whose will lies behind everything that happens to him.
MANIFEST GOD’S GLORY
To understand this we have to appreciate the way in which ‘glory’ (Greek doxa) functions in the Fourth Gospel and in the biblical tradition that lies behind it. According to that tradition no human being can see God and live (cf. John 1:18). But the created world and certain remarkable events display the presence, power, and character of the unseen God. In this sense they manifest God’s ‘glory’. The most striking example of God’s glory in the Old Testament is the pillar of cloud (that became at night a pillar of fire) which accompanied the Israelites at the time of their exodus from Egypt and years of subsequent wandering in the wilderness of Sinai (Exod 13:21; 40:34).
In the Fourth Gospel, as the Prologue (1:1-18) makes clear, the glory of God, revealed in this terrifying and remote way to the Israelites, has now been made manifest in the human flesh of Jesus: ‘And the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, the fullness of a gift that is truth’ (1:14).
DIVINE LOVE
As the drama of the Gospel proceeds, it becomes clear that the high point of this revelation of divine glory in the human flesh of Jesus will come about as he is ‘lifted up’ and dies upon the cross. This death – at one level a work of human violence and treachery in extreme degree – represents at a deeper level the free outpouring of divine love for the human race. Jesus’ ‘glorifies’ God in death in that he reveals the very being of God to be love (1 John 4:7, 16), becomes ‘transparent’, as it were, to the divine love (John 3:16). The retrospective (‘has been glorified’) and prospective (‘will glorify’) statements of Jesus in the gospel encompass a total process whereby both in his human life up till this and now, climactically, in his imminent death, God will be revealed as love.
The ‘new commandment’ given to the disciples – that they are to love one another, ‘just as I have loved you’ – flows essentially from this. It is ‘new’ in the sense that it is called for by the new set of circumstances that is fast approaching. After Jesus’ death and return to the Father, the community will no longer have the physical presence of Jesus to make the divine love palpable in their midst. Their own, equally palpable, love for one another must instead take on this role. If this high requirement is fulfilled, if they do indeed love one another after the pattern he has set, then this will signal to outsiders that they are truly his disciples.
As so often, then, in this Fourth Gospel, we have in the community’s understanding of itself the full sweep, so to speak, of Incarnation: the love which the members experience from one another, is an extension of the love they have received from Jesus, which is itself an extension of the divine love, reaching out to share eternal life with the world.
NEW CREATION
The Second Reading, from the Apocalypse, 21:1-5, depicts the sense of divine presence in the community in very different but complementary way. God’s work of redemption, something which continues until the final triumph of the Lamb, represents a ‘new creation’: new heaven, new earth and new city of Jerusalem (the community) in which God will be ‘at home’ with God’s people. What is presented is a glimpse of a future reality. But the depiction of it as ‘descending’ from heaven communicates the sense that its realisation is already under way here and now: the life of the present toiling, suffering and struggling community is indeed the ‘new creation’.
On a more historical level, the First Reading, from Acts 14:21-27, describes a further stage of the expansion of the community as Paul and Barnabas consolidate the mission to the Gentiles and bring back a report on this to their base church at Antioch.