He Lives Among Us

05-29-2022Weekly ReflectionFr. Anthony Okolo, CSSp

Today is the Seventh Sunday in Easter which means the Easter season is coming to an end. We celebrated Ascension last Thursday and next Sunday would be the Pentecost which brings the long period of Easter to a final close. One great thing we can take away from the Easter period is the affirmation that Jesus is alive and He lives among us. If He had not risen from the dead our faith would not have been credible and our preaching empty, however, since He has risen from the dead, we are sure that He lives among us and walks along with us in good times and bad.

Today is the Seventh Sunday in Easter which means the Easter season is coming to an end. We celebrated Ascension last Thursday and next Sunday would be the Pentecost which brings the long period of Easter to a final close. One great thing we can take away from the Easter period is the affirmation that Jesus is alive and He lives among us. If He had not risen from the dead our faith would not have been credible and our preaching empty, however, since He has risen from the dead, we are sure that He lives among us and walks along with us in good times and bad.

The first reading describes the martyrdom of Stephen by the people who are opposed to the Gospel message. The strangest incident in this story is that they are led by a young man called Saul who later became a great apostle of the Jesus he persecuted. The story has it that at the mention of the Son of God standing at the right hand of God by Stephen, the people saw his words as blasphemous and they closed their ears and threw him out of the city and began to stone him. This was the same way Jesus was treated by the Pharisees when He told them He was the Son of God. They could not understand how Jesus, of whom they knew His father, mother and relations, claim to be the Son of God. Most often those who reject the Gospel message would always look for reasons to support their rejection and they find it easily to see the message as something hard to take or blasphemous. This is still happening to date when people reject the Good News preached to them on the basis that it is intolerable. However, the example of Stephen who was filled with the Holy Spirit and never condemned his executors should be a lesson for us to follow.

The Gospel presents us with the priestly prayer of Jesus. This is the longest prayer of Jesus ever recorded in the entire scripture. It is a prayer for the Church of God He would leave behind. As God knows what may befall the church, He prays for the people and the church. The prayer is structured into three parts. In the first part Jesus prays for Himself and all those who would believe in Him. In this part we, all of us who believe in Him, are included. He offers each of us who believes in Him to His Father, that we should live in love as He lived in love with His father. In the second part He prays for the apostles and those who would believe in Him through the words of His chosen apostles. In this second part we are also included because the message of the gospel came to us through transmission by the apostles. He prays equally that the apostles should be united in love in the third part. He prays that all those who believe in Him should be united in love as He is united with the Father. This is the central message of the prayer of unity of Jesus.

According to John Paul II in his Ut Unum Sint 1995 he says “The unity of all divided humanity is the will of God. For this reason, He sent His Son, so that by dying and rising for us He might bestow on us the Spirit of Love. On the eve of His sacrifice on the cross, Jesus Himself prayed to the Father for His disciples and for all those who believe in Him, that they might be one, a living communion.” This is where some part of the Gospel message of today is taken from, where Jesus prays that Christians be united in love as He is His united in love with the Father. The Council Fathers of Vatican Two have earlier stated that “Division openly contradicts the will Christ, provides a stumbling block to the world and inflicts damage on the most holy cause of proclaiming the Good News to every creature. As we listen to this prayer of unity in today’s reading let us pray earnestly and work with sincere heart for unity among us Christians who believe in Christ.

Happy Sunday to you and may the Love of Christ unite us all.

Fr. Tony

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