The Gospel for The memorial of St. Charles Wanga and companions martyrs is taken from John 17. 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 belong 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. There are a few places in Scripture that make it clearer that God is in Jesus and Jesus is in God. They are one, yet they are two. It’s the great mystery of the Trinity.

But the most important thing for you and for me to understand when we look at Jesus is we are seeing God the Father. A vision of God the Father that was not present in the Old Testament. And when we see the disciples following Jesus and understanding him and growing in their conviction of everything he taught, we see them receiving glory. Glory is when we accomplish what we are here to do. It’s when we do it with truth, with the presence of the Holy Spirit and with integrity. Please reflect on these scriptures and then I will close with a prayer.

Foreign closing prayer. Father, we fail so often to understand the fact that we are not here to accomplish the things you tell us we should become. They are not within our realm to be able to accomplish, but they are only given, only shared. And our only task is to believe in them. Help us when we do not believe and we ask this in Jesus name, Amen.