Two farewells anchor the seventh week of Easter today: Jesus lifting his eyes to the Father at the end of the Last Supper, and Paul, years later, taking leave of the elders of Ephesus on the beach at Miletus. Both speak the language of a finished course; both reveal the strange shape of glory in the missionary key.
"After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, 'Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed. I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you have given me, because they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you.'" (Jn 17:1-11a)
The seventh week of Easter places two farewells side by side. In the Gospel, Jesus closes the long discourse of the Upper Room by lifting his eyes to the Father — the opening of what tradition calls the "high-priestly prayer", because in it the Son speaks for those entrusted to him as a priest stands before God for the people. In the first reading, Paul, some thirty years later, summons the elders of Ephesus to Miletus and says farewell to them on the shore, knowing he will not see their faces again. Two scenes; one shape.
The prayer of Jesus begins with a word that the modern ear easily misreads: "Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son" (Jn 17, 1). Doxa — glory — does not mean splendour, fanfare, or visible triumph here. In Johannine usage, the "glorification" of the Son is precisely his hour on the Cross: the moment when the love of the Father is fully manifested in the surrender of the Son. "Glorify me" is "let the Cross now show who I am." The prayer is austere, not ornamental.
And the content of the eternal life Jesus prays for is just as sober: "that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent" (Jn 17, 3). Ginōskein in the Johannine sense — not information about God, but encounter, relation, the kind of knowing that transforms. Eternal life is already begun for those who know the Father in the Son. It does not wait for an afterworld.
Paul, on the beach at Miletus, speaks the same logic in a quite different register. He has served the Lord with humility, with tears, with the trials brought by hostile plots; he has held nothing back from his teaching of the Ephesians, "in public or from house to house" (Ac 20, 20). And now, constrained by the Spirit, he goes to Jerusalem, knowing that chains and trials await him. "But I do not consider my life of any value to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the Gospel of the grace of God"* (Ac 20, 24).
"I do not consider my life of any value." The Greek is direct: ou logou poioumai, "I make no account of it." Not a heroic boast, but the simple statement of someone whose centre of gravity has shifted entirely outward — to the course, to the ministry, to the Gospel of grace. Paul is in the same posture as Jesus in John 17: a life that has been received and is now being returned, with nothing held back.
In the spirit of Bethlehem we read both texts in the key of kenosis — the self-emptying of Philippians 2. The Lord "emptied himself, taking the form of a servant" (Ph 2, 7), and the apostle, after him, empties himself of his own life so that the Gospel of grace may pass through. This is the eternal Bethlehem statement turned outward: the smallness of God lived now in the smallness of the missionary, who counts nothing as his own. The Constitutions of the SMB call this simplicity of heart (§6) — the disposition Christ taught from the manger and that the missionary inherits.
What does this ask of us, on this Tuesday of the seventh week of Easter? To let the word 'glory' slowly lose its splendour and gain its true weight — the weight of a life fully given. To ask the Father, with the Son, not for fanfare but for the grace to finish the course we have been given. And to dare, like Paul, to say with him: "I make no account of my life, if only…" — letting the 'if only' be the only thing that matters.
Prayer of the Day
Father, glorify your Son in us. Grant us to know you — not from afar but in the encounter that is itself eternal life. Give us the courage of Paul: to finish the course you set, with humility and tears if need be, holding nothing back of the Gospel of grace. Make us, like Christ, willing to count our life as nothing if only your name be made known. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
For Meditation
- What is our "course" — the ministry we have actually received and not the one we imagined?
- Where do we still hold something back from the people the Father has entrusted to us?
- Can we say "I make no account of my life, if only…" — and how does our "if only" finish?
