John 17:20-26 (NRSV)

20[Jesus looked toward heaven and said,] “My prayer is not for [my disciples] alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— 23I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.
24“Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.
25“Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. 26I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”

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In this, one of my favorite passages from the Christian Scriptures, Jesus reaches out across nearly two thousand years to speak directly to you and me in conversation with his heavenly Father: “I pray also for those will believe in me through [the disciples’] message, that all may be one…” It’s pretty amazing that just hours before his own death, Jesus is not thinking only about himself, but about you and me, and how he wants us to be united with him just as he is united with God.

Traditionally, Holy Thursday is celebrated as the “birthday” of the Sacrament of Eucharist, wherein Jesus uses the rich symbolism and solemn occasion of the Passover meal to introduce an even more radical event of God’s saving power—the suffering, death, and resurrection of his only Son. From the time of Moses onward, food and wine were consumed at Passover as symbols of the Israelites’ suffering in slavery and their trust in God’s promise that he would rescue them.
As Jesus and his friends reclined at table to celebrate this most hallowed event and to recall the liberation of their ancestors from bondage, Jesus makes a startling claim—namely, that the bread they are about to share should be received as if it were his very body, and the cup as if it were brimming with his blood like a sacrificial offering. In doing so, Jesus is inviting not only his disciples but also us, for whom he prays so fervently in this passage, to share in a new kind of intimate relationship with God and each other—one which Jesus names in his prayer above as a “complete unity.”

Throughout our Lenten journey, we are asked both to recognize and to reconcile wherever possible the reality of our sinfulness. And if we think of sin as a place where our relationship with self, God, or others has been bent or broken, then we could say Lent is about acknowledging as well as attempting to reassemble shattered parts of our lives. But now, as Lent draws to a close and we prepare to accompany Jesus into the midst of his own brokenness, he speaks to us of a total unity, an unimaginably wholesome repair to our relationships, and of the divine love which makes such unity possible.

In the midst of such a profound appeal to renewed relationship with God and our neighbor, may we consider tonight just what it means that Jesus invites us, as he did his disciples at their last supper together, to eat and drink together with him. And, in light of Jesus’ own prayer on our behalf (“I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”), may we begin this sacred Triduum by joining in Jesus’ prayer for unity, emulating his example of love, and preparing within our own hearts a fitting place where he can dwell as one with each of us.