“Are you following Christ's ambitions for your life or expecting Him to help you reach yours?”

Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone's task is unique as his specific opportunity to implement it. - Viktor E. Frankl: (1905 – 1997: was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist as well as a Holocaust survivor)

Gospel Text: (JN 17:1-11A)

Jesus raised his eyes to heaven and said,

“Father, the hour has come.

Give glory to your son, so that your son may glorify you,

just as you gave him authority over all people,

so that your son may give eternal life to all you gave him.

Now this is eternal life,

that they should know you, the only true God,

and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ.

I glorified you on earth

by accomplishing the work that you gave me to do.

Now glorify me, Father, with you,

with the glory that I had with you before the world began.

“I revealed your name to those whom you gave me out of the world.

They belonged to you, and you gave them to me,

and they have kept your word.

Now they know that everything you gave me is from you,

because the words you gave to me I have given to them,

and they accepted them and truly understood that I came from you,

and they have believed that you sent me.

I pray for them.

I do not pray for the world but for the ones you have given me,

because they are yours, and everything of mine is yours

and everything of yours is mine,

and I have been glorified in them.

And now I will no longer be in the world,

but they are in the world, while I am coming to you.”

In today’s Gospel passage, Jesus speaks candidly to His Father about the mission He was given and how He had fulfilled that mission. What is it, though, that Jesus accomplished? He was a failure in the eyes of the world. It takes eyes of faith to see anything worth imitating in Christ Jesus. The sort of vision that sees in Jesus a Messiah, a Savior, is the vision that we acquire only slowly in life, and which along the way we might even lose at times.

Yet with those eyes of faith we can see that each of us has been given a mission in Christ. In various ways, we are to proclaim the good news of salvation to others. We hear much on the news of violence and despair in the world as the media portrays it in every form. It clouds the vision that Jesus wants us to have: that suffering and death do not have to have the last say in our lives.

How has the resurrection changed our lives? Coming to the end of this year’s celebration of Lent, the Sacred Triduum and Easter, are we more determined to live the message of Jesus? Are we more aware that He lives not only for us but in us? And will we make the necessary changes in our lives to mirror the life of Jesus?