Holy Father, keep them in your name
4 JUNE (Jn 17,11b-19)
Every man is marked by the time that ends and expires. When time comes, it has already come. You have to leave everything. Death seals a relationship of irreversible separation. Before one was, after he no longer is. Jesus himself before took visibly care of his disciples. Now, at the moment of death, he might no longer do it. He needs to make his holocaust on Golgotha. His mission is now another.
This time comes for all. Time to leave, to abandon what you have done comes for everyone. This is a necessary condition of humanity. It cannot be postponed. Even if you could postpone, it could be done for some other time, but then time to leave comes. You must leave. Who the work accomplished by us so that it is not lost, does not fade away, is not consumed with our departure must be entrusted to? Today Jesus teaches us how to act. Everything we have done is put in the hands of the father.
The Father was the one to assign us time. He is the one that showed us the place of our missionary work. He was always the one to give us the persons to take into custody and lead them into all the truth. As good workers, we have to take our work and deliver it to our mission Giver. Lord, this is the work you entrusted me with. I did it with a right conscience, with a pure heart, with a free spirit and with an always updated intelligence with the truth of your Holy Spirit. Now you ask me to deliver you all the work. Here it is. Guard it in your holiness and truth so that nothing is lost. You know how to make it bear fruit again. You can put it back to life, keep it in your most holy light so that darkness may have never to take it back.
This truth must bring peace in our hearts. Instead, we deliver the fruits of our labour to men. Then we complain that much of it is lost every day. On the contrary, who hands it over with faith to the Father of Heaven, he starts with a joyful heart, rich in faith, free from the future, because he knows that the Lord will work everything so that nothing is lost. Often, instead we observe that there are interferences in the work we have left and assumed by others, which cause nothing but trouble and unnecessary troubles. It is as if the work were still ours. We forget that it is the Lord’s.
And now I will no longer be in the world, but they are in the world, while I am coming to you. Holy Father, keep them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one just as we are. When I was with them I protected them in your name that you gave me, and I guarded them, and none of them was lost except the son of destruction, in order that the scripture might be fulfilled. But now I am coming to you. I speak this in the world so that they may share my joy completely. I gave them your word, and the world hated them, because they do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world but that you keep them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world. Consecrate them in the truth. Your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world. And I consecrate myself for them, so that they also may be consecrated in truth.
Jesus must be imitated in everything. He is leaving. He is about to return to the Father. He must leave the earth according to his visible mode. He enters invisibility. Who will take care of his Church, his disciples, those who believed and believe in his name? Only the Father. This work is only his. Who is Jesus Christ? Is he not the work of the Father in favour of the salvation of mankind? He is not perhaps the gift of the Father for our eternal redemption? Did the Father maybe ever abandon his desire to bring the man in the most intimate communion with Him? Did he not always taken care of humanity, intervening directly into our history day after day? Either we trust in God and deliver everything to Him, or we will be witnesses in the world of a shortage, absence of faith and deprivation of genuine truth; we will be for all a bad example of how missionary work is carried out in the house of the living God. We must all rise to a more perfect imitation of Jesus the Lord. He is God yet he has delivered all to the Father. We too must leave, but delivering everything to God.
Virgin Mary, Mother of the Redemption, Angels and Saints make us perfect imitators of Jesus.