Consecrated to God for service

Seventh Sunday of Easter Year B

The last line of today’s passage, words uttered in prayer to the Father by our Lord at the Last Supper, contain familiar themes but spun in a uniquely new way. The fact that the Son is on the Father’s mission and we are now sent on mission by the Son is familiar to all of us, “As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.” The second part of this line, however, contains another familiar theme, but our Lord uses it in a new and, let’s admit, strange way. We who are sinners, certainly recognise our need to be consecrated. But what about Jesus, the All Holy One? Why would He say “I consecrate myself.”

Let’s first examine the concept of “consecration.” You may not know the exact definition of the word but from its general application, we understand it to be making something or someone “holy,” e.g. the priest consecrates the bread and wine during Mass, a religious brother or sister is consecrated to the Lord, buildings are consecrated as churches.

Pope Emeritus Benedict explains the concept of “consecration” in his Chrism Mass homily: “To consecrate something or someone means, therefore, to give that thing or person to God as his property, to take it out of the context of what is ours and to insert it in his milieu, so that it no longer belongs to our affairs, but is totally of God. Consecration is thus a taking away from the world and a giving over to the living God. The thing or person no longer belongs to us, or even to itself, but is immersed in God.” This explanation for “consecration” could easily be applied to that of a sacrifice. A sacrifice is something which we consecrate, set apart for God.

Consecration thus involves movement in two directions – firstly, away from the world, from our grasp, from our control, and then, offered towards God. We then begin to understand the preceding text of today’s passage in the light of this last line:

Jesus consecrates Himself in the sense of Him turning away from the world which has rejected Him and His returning to God. He consecrates Himself by offering His own life on the cross. His consecration is now the basis of our consecration.

And so now, because of what the Lord has done for us, we are to turn away from sin, from the world because we do not belong to the world as much as the Lord does not belong to this world. We are re-orientated - we are turned in the direction of Christ, our spiritual East - turned towards God because through our Lord’s consecration, we too have been consecrated, we have been set apart from the world for God.

This double consecration of our Lord and His followers are re-enacted in the Eucharist. The sacrifice of our Lord, where He consecrates Himself by giving up His life on the altar of the cross to God for our sake, is sacramentally present at every Mass. Our Lord identifies His flesh and blood, given on the cross, as bread and wine and now commands His disciples to eat this bread, which is the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink this wine, the sign of the new covenant. The disciples’ participation in the divine communion, made possible by our Lord’s sacrifice on the cross and deepened by the Eucharist, sustains them on their mission. It is also a reminder that true unity is not man-made; but God-made! Only the All Holy God can make us Holy, and only the Most Holy Trinity, who lives in perfect unity, can make us one.

Now all this may seem to suggest that Christians are elitist and segregationist. We seem to claim that we are better than others, in the sense of being superior to them. Such aloofness and arrogance is certainly not the purpose of consecration. Rather, as Pope Benedict pointed out once again, such consecration “is not a segregation. Rather, being given over to God means being charged to represent others.” The Pope then gives the example of a priest, a man chosen from among the people and “set apart” for God. He explains, “The priest is removed from worldly bonds and given over to God, and precisely in this way, starting with God, he must be available for others, for everyone.” So, our consecration does not place us above others but at the feet of others - in the service of others.

Consecration ultimately leads to communion rather than alienation. In fact, when we choose to get along with the world, when we choose to fit in with the world and its values in order to be accepted and approved by the world, we end up alienating ourselves from God and without God, there can be no true authentic communion with others. The false communion offered by the world comes at a heavy cost. We have to sacrifice whatever is good, true and beautiful.

The Church is wholly serious about the work of building unity because our Lord taught that unity is essential to the life of His disciples, as it is the visible manifestation of their invisible sharing in the divine communion. But the call for unity does not mean that we should be pushing the unity agenda at all costs and do “whatever it takes” to accomplish that goal. Authentic unity cannot be humanly manufactured and achieved at the expense of sacrificing the truth. There can only be true unity if one is consecrated in truth, because a unity based on a lie would be a frivolous and fragile unity. True unity must be built on the foundation of truth because there is no opposition between love and truth. Love which is the fundamental bond of unity always serves truth, and truth is always at the service of charity.

Pope Benedict ends his Chrism Mass homily with this beautiful reminder: “When we talk about being sanctified in the truth, should we forget that in Jesus Christ truth and love are one? Being immersed in Him means being immersed in His goodness, in true love. True love does not come cheap, it can also prove quite costly. It resists evil in order to bring men true good. If we become one with Christ, we learn to recognise Him precisely in the suffering, in the poor, in the little ones of this world; then we become people who serve, who recognise our brothers and sisters in Him, and in them, we encounter Him.”