This Sunday of Eastertide each year gives us an opportunity to hear part of the final chapter of St John’s account of the Last Supper, which is a wonderful prayer addressed by our Lord to His heavenly Father. Having come to the end of his long discourse to the Apostles, He is about to leave with them for Gethsemane. There He will pray with such pain and intensity that He will sweat blood. Here in the Upper Room He prepares Himself for all that lies ahead by this extraordinary prayer. Nothing else in the whole New Testament is like it, where we hear the Son of God addressing His Father with love as He prepares to offer Himself as a sacrifice. Here He shows Himself to the Apostles as a priest, about to offer the one perfect sacrifice which will consecrate us to God. Chapter 17 is entirely dedicated to Christ’s prayer to His heavenly Father at the end of the Last Supper in preparation for His imminent sacrifice, to be accomplished the very next day on the cross. It is also an extraordinary prayer, in that we are given an intimate experience of what it meant for the Son of God to pray to His Father; for the one who is ‘the Word who was with God in the beginning, and who was Himself God.’ We are privileged to hear, through the testimony of the Beloved Disciple who leant on God the Son’s breast at the Last Supper, the very words addressed by the Son of God to His Father on the eve of his leaving the world to return to the Father.
The Word, who was with God in the beginning, through whom all things were made, used human language to speak to His heavenly Father. This was so because the ‘Word was made flesh’, He took our human nature to Himself when He became Mary’s son, and therefore He is now able to speak, as man, to the Father whose Son and perfect image He has always been, and still is even as man. This is an amazing thought. Let us try and grasp it, however imperfectly, so as to gain even a tiny glimpse of the inner depths that this great prayer reveals. For those inner depths are of the life of God Himself, and of the one who is true God and true man.
First of all, the prayer opens with these significant words: ‘Jesus raised His eyes to heaven.’ This raising of the eyes towards the place where the Father dwells is the origin of what the priest does at Mass when he faithfully repeats the actions of our Lord at the Supper, thus: ‘He took bread in His holy and venerable hands, and with eyes raised to heaven to you, O God, His almighty Father...’ so begin the words of the central part of the Eucharistic prayer. So then let us think of what the whole of the Eucharistic prayer means. At the very beginning of that Prayer, sometimes also known as ‘the Great Prayer’ on account both of its length and its supreme importance in the heart of the Mass, there is a dialogue in which the priest calls on you, the faithful, to ‘lift up your hearts’, and to ‘give thanks to the Lord our God’. It is this ‘giving thanks’ which is at the very centre of the entire Mass, and the Greek word for ‘giving thanks’, ‘Eucharist’, is itself one of the names by which we know both the whole Mass and its principal fruit, the Blessed Sacrament.
After that dialogue between the priest and the congregation, he continues to pray alone, just as Christ prays alone in the Gospel reading. This is because the priest is acting ‘in persona Christi’, which means that by virtue of his ordination, he is made a sharer in the very priesthood of Christ Himself. First of all there is the Preface, which is a hymn of praise to God, often closely connected with the feast day or season we are celebrating. So today, for instance, the Preface is a hymn of praise to God for the Ascension of Christ His Son, which brings us hope of heaven. Then, at the end of this Preface we all sing the Sanctus, so as to join the angels worshipping God in heaven, just as the Prophet Isaiah heard them singing: ‘Holy, holy, holy Lord God of Hosts, heaven and earth are full of your glory’. After this, once more the priest continues alone with the great prayer, addressing the Father in the same way that Christ prayed at the Last Supper. After praying for the Church, he prays that the bread and wine may be changed into Christ’s body and blood, and then does what our Lord did at the Last Supper, using the same words and actions, and as we say, consecrating the bread and wine to become our sacrifice to God, and the Blessed Sacrament for our Holy Communion. He then prays that God the Father will graciously accept this very sacrifice, as being Christ’s sacrifice and that of His whole Church. He prays that the Holy Spirit may consecrate those who will receive the Blessed Sacrament in Holy Communion, to keep in them in unity and make them holy. At the end of the great prayer, the priest raises aloft the sacrificial gifts in a gesture of offering and praises the Father through Christ, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. In all this, the priest is doing what Christ did; praying Christ’s own entire prayer of supplication on behalf of the whole Church; the prayer of thanksgiving, of blessing, of consecration and of self-sacrifice. Giving thanks and blessing are two ways of expressing the same action and prayer; so in the first and third Eucharistic prayers the priest says: ‘[Jesus] took bread, and...giving you thanks, he said the blessing...’ while in the second Eucharistic prayer the priest says: ‘He took bread, and giving thanks, broke it...’
This is why chapter 17 of St John’s Gospel is so significant, because it is Jesus’s own Eucharistic prayer of thanksgiving, of blessing, and of consecration. Consecration is something that a priest alone can do. When we call Christ the one High Priest, it is because of this prayer which consecrates all He will do on the cross the next day. It is the prayer of the Son of God, of Jesus our priest, consecrating Himself to be the sacrifice offered the next day on the cross. This is why we say that every Mass is a re-presentation of the one single sacrifice; it was offered on Maundy Thursday in the signs of bread and wine and in the prayer of thanksgiving and consecration, and it was offered in blood and suffering on Good Friday – but they were one and the same sacrifice. So too, now, every Mass is one and the same sacrifice as that offered by Christ, and as He offered and consecrated Himself at the Last Supper, so too in every Mass Christ offers and consecrates Himself through the hands and words of the ordained priest to continue offering the same perfect sacrifice.
The Gospel we have just listened makes this point. In it we hear only our Lord’s words of prayer, nothing else. Throughout this chapter Jesus prays that those the Father has given Him, His Apostles, may be true to God’s name, and that they may all be one; then also because they do not belong to the world, that they may be protected from the evil one. Yet He prays not only for the Apostles, but for ‘those also who through their words will believe in [Him]’, that is all Catholics of every age. Then at the end of today’s Gospel reading, our Lord makes this prayer to His Father: ‘consecrate them in the truth….for their sake I consecrate myself so that they too may be consecrated in truth.’
This is the very heart of the prayer that the Son makes to His Father, which we enter into at every Mass. For while we can never repeat that sacrifice offered once for all on the cross, we can and indeed do relive it ourselves every time we do what He commanded us to do in memory of Him. And this was His command to the Church, to consecrate bread and wine into His own body and blood, so that He could thereby consecrate us, nourish us with His own body and blood, fill us with His Holy Spirit and make of us an eternal offering to the Father, so that we may obtain an inheritance with all the elect, the chosen saints in His kingdom, where we hope to enjoy for ever the fullness of His glory.
It is this one and the same Christ who so consecrated Himself at the Last Supper as to consecrate us, giving Himself to be our nourishment in the Blessed Sacrament and to be our sacrifice in the Mass; and it is through Him, with Him and in Him that we shall render all glory and honour to God the Almighty Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, for ever and ever. Amen.
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