Published: May 16, 2026
There is a sentence in today's Gospel that, if we let it sink in slowly, has the power to completely reshape the way we approach prayer. Jesus looks at His disciples and says: "Until now you have asked nothing in my name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full." It is both an invitation and a gentle correction — a reminder that there is a depth of intimacy with the Father that most of us have not yet dared to explore. And the door to that depth, Jesus says, is prayer offered in His name.
The passage from John 16:23b-28 sits within the great farewell discourse, those precious final hours in which Jesus prepares His disciples not just for His departure but for the life they will live after it. He is drawing back a curtain. "I have said these things to you in figures of speech," He tells them, "but the hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures of speech but will tell you plainly about the Father." There is a movement here — from veiled to unveiled, from symbol to substance, from the partial knowledge of disciples still learning to walk, to the full knowledge of those who will be filled with the Holy Spirit. Jesus is telling them: you are about to understand, in a way you have never understood before, how the Father regards you.
And then He says the most startling thing of all. "The Father himself loves you." Not: the Father tolerates you. Not: the Father puts up with you because of me. The Father himself, in His own person, with His own eternal love, loves you. Jesus explains the ground for this love — "because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God" — but the love itself is not a transaction. It is the natural posture of the Father toward those who have drawn near to the Son. To know Jesus is to find yourself already known by the Father. To love Jesus is to discover that the Father's love for you was there long before you turned toward it.
This is the theological foundation for what Jesus is saying about prayer. When He instructs us to ask in His name, He is not giving us a password or a formula. He is inviting us into a relationship — the same relationship of trust and love that He Himself shares with the Father. Praying in the name of Jesus means bringing our requests before the Father not as strangers hoping to be noticed, but as beloved children who have been granted access to the very heart of God. It means aligning our desires, our intentions, and our expectations with the will and mission of Christ, so that what we ask is genuinely shaped by who He is and what He came to do.
This is not easy, and it is worth sitting honestly with why. Much of our prayer, if we are truthful, is driven by what we want rather than what God wills. We bring Him our lists, our emergencies, our preferences, and our plans — and we hope He will agree. There is nothing wrong with honest petition; in fact, Jesus is actively encouraging it here. But praying in His name asks something more of us. It asks us to be willing to have our desires examined, refined, and sometimes redirected by the one in whose name we pray. The joy He promises — "that your joy may be full" — is not the joy of getting everything we asked for in the form we imagined. It is the deeper joy of being so united with God's will that what we receive is exactly what love would have chosen for us.
The first reading from Acts 18 gives us a beautiful and concrete illustration of what it looks like when genuine formation accompanies genuine zeal. Apollos arrives in Ephesus — eloquent, scripturally learned, fervent in spirit. He knows the story of Jesus and proclaims it boldly. Yet Priscilla and Aquila, two humble lay believers, perceive that something is incomplete in his understanding. He knows only the baptism of John. His foundation, though solid in many ways, is missing the fullness of what the Resurrection and the gift of the Spirit have revealed. And so they take him aside — not publicly, not harshly, but with pastoral care — and they explain the Way of God more accurately.
What is remarkable is what Apollos does next. He listens. He accepts the correction. A man of considerable gifts — eloquent, competent, widely praised — sits with tentmakers and allows them to tell him that he does not yet know the whole story. This is docility in the truest sense: not weakness or passivity, but the active, deliberate choice to value truth over ego. And the result is extraordinary. When we next encounter Apollos, he has crossed to Achaia and is vigorously refuting his opponents, demonstrating from the Scriptures that Jesus is the Christ. His formation completed, his fervor becomes fruit.
There is a deep connection between the two readings today. Both the Gospel and the story of Apollos are about what happens when we humbly bring ourselves — our requests, our knowledge, our zeal, our very understanding of God — and allow them to be expanded by something greater than ourselves. Jesus invites the disciples to pray in His name, which means surrendering their merely human notions of what they need and entering into the Father's infinitely wiser love. Apollos brings his considerable gifts to Priscilla and Aquila and discovers that humble openness to fuller truth is not a threat to his mission but the very thing that will make it effective.
For us, the practical invitation is twofold. In our prayer, we are being asked to move from the shallows to the deep — to stop bringing the Father our wish list and start bringing Him our whole hearts, willing to hear not just what He will give us but what He wants to form in us. "Ask, and you will receive," Jesus says, and this is genuinely true. But asking in His name is a practice that takes a lifetime of growing into, because it requires that we slowly come to want what God wants, which is far better than anything we would have chosen for ourselves.
And in our life of faith, we are being asked for the docility of Apollos. There are always more layers to the Gospel than we have understood, always aspects of the Way of God that we have not yet been shown. The Church, the Scriptures, the sacraments, and even the humble witness of other believers are the Priscillas and Aquilas in our lives — patient, clear-eyed guides who can take us aside and explain the Way more accurately, if only we are willing to listen.
"I came from the Father," Jesus says at the close of today's Gospel, "and have come into the world, and now I am leaving the world and going to the Father." He came to show us the way home. He is asking us now to follow — through prayer, through humility, through docility to the truth — all the way into the fullness of the Father's love.
Gospel: John 16:23b-28 | Saturday of the 6th Week of Easter