Published: May 19, 2026
There is a moment in the Gospel of John so intimate, so layered with tenderness and theological depth, that it has been called the "High Priestly Prayer" of Jesus. We encounter it today, on this Tuesday of the Seventh Week of Easter, as Jesus lifts his eyes to heaven and speaks directly to the Father on the eve of his passion. What we overhear in John 17:1-11a is not a public sermon, not a parable for the crowds, not a rebuke of the Pharisees. It is a prayer — and in that prayer, Jesus reveals something that should stop us in our tracks: a definition of eternal life that has nothing to do with location and everything to do with relationship.
"Now this is eternal life," Jesus prays, "that they should know you, the only true God, and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ." In the Greek of the New Testament, the word used here for "know" is ginosko — not a cold intellectual awareness, but the kind of knowing that comes only through lived, ongoing, personal encounter. It is the same word used to describe the intimacy between a husband and wife, between a shepherd and his sheep, between a disciple and his rabbi. Jesus is not saying that eternal life begins when we die and go to heaven. He is saying that eternal life begins now, in the living, breathing act of coming to know God more deeply each day.
This is both a consolation and a challenge. The consolation is this: eternal life is already accessible to us. It is not locked away behind the gates of death, dispensed only to those who have passed their final examination. Every morning we wake up is an opportunity to enter more fully into it. Every time we sit with the Scriptures, every time we receive the Eucharist, every time we allow silence to carve out a space for God in the noise of our lives, we are participating in something that will never end. The eternal life Jesus speaks of is not merely an extension of time; it is a different quality of living altogether — existence transformed by the knowledge and love of the living God.
The challenge, of course, is that this kind of knowing requires something of us. It requires attention. We live in a world relentlessly demanding our focus — our screens, our anxieties, our endless to-do lists. And yet Jesus, in his prayer, is pointing us toward the one thing necessary. The mystics of the Church have always understood this. Saint Teresa of Ávila described the interior life as a series of "mansions," each one drawing the soul deeper into friendship with God. Saint John of the Cross wrote about the dark night not as an absence of God but as God's way of purifying our love, clearing away all the lesser things we had mistaken for him. What they discovered — and what Jesus names plainly in this prayer — is that knowing God is the very substance of human flourishing.
It is worth pausing on the phrase "the only true God." In a culture saturated with competing claims on our ultimate loyalty, this is a quietly radical statement. Jesus does not say the best god, or the most powerful god, or the god of one particular tribe. He says the only true God. This is the God who is not an idol — not a projection of our desires, not a divine rubber stamp for our agendas, not a vending machine dispensing blessings in exchange for religious performance. The only true God is the one who exists independently of our imaginations, whose nature is love, whose glory is fully revealed in the face of the Son.
And then Jesus turns to what he has done with the life the Father gave him. "I glorified you on earth by accomplishing the work that you gave me to do." This is the model he holds out not only as a report of his own mission but as a template for ours. Each of us has been given work to do — not in the abstract, but specifically and concretely. The work of raising children with faith and love. The work of honest labor, offered with integrity. The work of showing up for a neighbor in grief. The work of forgiving someone who has wounded us. The work of bearing witness, even when it is inconvenient or costly, to the grace of God active in our lives. Jesus glorified the Father not by doing everything, but by faithfully accomplishing what he had been given. We are called to the same.
Notice, too, how Jesus prays for his disciples. "I pray for them," he says. "I do not pray for the world but for those you gave me." This can sound, at first hearing, like Jesus is drawing a tight circle of concern. But read in context, the movement of the entire Gospel of John makes clear that the disciples are sent precisely into the world, as witnesses, as lights, as instruments of the same grace that Jesus embodies. He prays for them not because the world does not matter, but because they are the ones entrusted with carrying his mission forward — including us, who have received the faith through those first witnesses.
There is something deeply comforting about knowing that Jesus prayed for us, that on the night before his death, when he could have spent those hours in any way at all, he chose to intercede. The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that he continues to intercede for us even now, at the right hand of the Father. We are never alone in our efforts to know God. We are never left to figure out eternal life by ourselves. The one who defined it is also the one walking with us into it.
In the first reading today, Saint Paul speaks to the elders of Ephesus with words that echo the same spirit: he declares that he counts his life of no importance, if only he may finish his course and the ministry received from the Lord Jesus. There is a beautiful coherence between the two readings. Paul has caught something of what Jesus prays — that life is not measured by years or accomplishments or comfort, but by faithfulness to the mission entrusted to us and by the quality of our knowing of God.
So today, as we come to Mass, as we receive the Eucharist — which is nothing less than the Body and Blood of the one who defines eternal life as knowing God — we might pause and ask ourselves a simple question: How well do I know the only true God? Not how much do I know about him, but how deeply have I allowed him to know me? Because the extraordinary promise of the gospel is that he already does. And in that knowing, the eternal has already begun.
Gospel: John 17:1-11a | Tuesday of the Seventh Week of Easter