Wednesday of the Seventh Week of Pascal Time [English]

Saint Paul receiving the farewell of the priests of Ephesus (1705) Galloche, Louis

Consecrated in Truth: The Wolf’s Anti-Trap

Mass Readings: Acts 20:28-38; Psalm 67/68; Jn 17:11b-19

We are moving forward into this seventh week of Easter, a precious time when the Church slows her pace to inhabit the waiting. Last Sunday, we heard Jesus lift His eyes to heaven to draw us into His intimate prayer. He promised not to leave us as orphans, revealing that our existence is wrapped in the Father's tenderness.

Today, the Word of God brings us back down to earth, to the heart of the most concrete and sometimes most painful realities of our daily lives: the experience of farewells, vulnerability, and threat. Following Christ does not mean living in an anesthetized bubble; it means learning to stand tall when visible securities collapse and doubt tries to seep in.

First Point: The Wolf Within and the Antidote of the Gift

The first reading continues Paul’s farewell to the elders of Ephesus, and in this text, we can touch the deep emotion he showed. Paul spent three years with these men, he wept tears for them, he worked with his own hands so as not to cost them anything, and now, he is leaving. His warning is of a striking lucidity: "... I know that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock. And from among your own selves will arise men speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them..."

The greatest danger to our inner peace and to our communities never comes from the outside, but from the divisions born within us. The wolf, in the Bible, is the one who scatters, the one who captures the other to feed himself, the one who instrumentalizes relationships for his own advantage.

In the face of this spiritual threat, Paul does not leave a manual of procedures or an army to protect the disciples; he makes an act of pure trust: "I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which has the power to build you up..." The only true security for a Christian consists in letting go of the need to control everything in order to surrender to the gratuitousness of grace.

To illustrate this, Paul quotes a saying of Jesus that is written nowhere else in the Gospels: "It is more blessed to give than to receive." This is the absolute antidote to the wolf's poison: the wolf takes, the shepherd gives. While anxiety pushes us to hold back, to accumulate, and to suspect, grace pushes us to enlarge the space of our tent. When we accept that our life no longer belongs to us, threats immediately lose their power over us.

Second Point: Kept in the Name to Overcome Isolation

This trust of Paul is rooted directly in the priestly prayer of Jesus that we continue to read in today’s Gospel of John. Christ lifts His eyes to heaven and pronounces words that are like a shield for our hearts: "Holy Father, keep my disciples in your name... that they may be one, even as we are." The unity to which Jesus calls us is not the result of human effort or a mutual tolerance agreement; it is a participation in the very life of the Trinity.

The trap of the Evil One, from which Jesus asks the Father to keep us, is to make us believe that we are isolated, forgotten, left to ourselves: the Evil One wants to convince us that we are orphans, breaking the promise of the previous Sunday.

Jesus says that He watched over them and that the world hated them because they do not belong to the world. The "world," in Saint John, is not the beauty of creation but that system of thought that wants to be self-sufficient, that logic that refuses dependence on a Father. If you try to live with truth, gentleness, and purity, you will inevitably feel friction with the surrounding mentality; indeed, your peace will be perceived as a provocation by those who live in agitation.

But Christ does not pray for the Father to take us out of the world! Our vocation is not to flee into a desert or to hide behind walls of rigid certainties. Our vocation is to inhabit the world, to go grocery shopping, to raise our children, to work at our desks, but while being plugged into another power source: the Name of the Father.

Third Point: Consecrated by the Word to Be Sent

The pinnacle of Jesus' prayer lies in this pressing request: "Sanctify them in the truth: your word is truth." The word sanctify, in the biblical tradition, means to set apart, to consecrate, to reserve for God. But this Christian consecration has a unique dynamic: we are set apart not to be isolated, but to be sent. "As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world." Holiness is not a moral cleanliness that we protect from the dust of the world; it is a fire that we throw into the midst of the rubble to warm everything up.

To be sanctified in the truth is to accept that the Word of God is the ultimate criterion for our choices, our thoughts, and our reactions. Truth is not a majority opinion, nor is it a passing feeling; Truth is Christ Himself. To be in the truth is to look at our life, our sufferings, and our relationships through the eyes of Jesus, and not through the distorting prism of our fears.

Jesus says that He sanctifies Himself for us; this means that, by His death and resurrection, He opens up a space where we can finally live without lying and without needing to wear masks to be loved. Indeed, it is this consecration that gives us the courage that Saint Paul had. We can walk toward the unknown, we can face breakups and tears, because we know that the Word of God is the firm ground on which our feet rest.

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Conclusion and Application for Our Day

This Wednesday’s Word, therefore, invites us to a profound simplification: it asks us to check where we place our security and how we react to the uncertainties of our daily lives. Based on this revelation, we are called to:

• Identify the wolf's speech. Take a moment today to listen to your thoughts: are there voices in you sowing division, mistrust towards others, or bitterness over a situation? This is the perverse speech Paul was talking about. Deliberately choose to cut off these thoughts and commend yourself to the word of His grace.

• Practice the joy of giving. In the face of the anxiety of lack or the need for recognition, make an act of gratuitousness today: give a little of your time, offer quality listening to an annoying colleague, or do a favor without anyone knowing. Experience that by expending effort for the weak, your heart becomes lighter and more joyful.

• Inhabit our sending into the world. Do not flee from the difficulties of your day by grumbling about the harshness of the times. Tell yourself this morning, as you begin your activities: "Jesus sends me exactly here, in this job, in this family, with this difficult person." Your mission is not to change the world by your own strength, but to be a reflection of the unity and truth that you draw from prayer.

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Prayer

Lord Jesus, I thank You for the depth of Your prayer which envelops and protects me at every moment of my day. Thank You for not leaving me as an orphan in the face of the wolves of anxiety, doubt, and division that sometimes prowl around my heart.

Forgive my cowardice, my murmurings, and my futile attempts to control everything by myself. Come visit my fears of tomorrow and my sadness in the face of life's separations. I place myself back into Your hands, and I choose to believe that it is more blessed to give than to receive.

Holy Spirit, divine Defender, sanctify me in the truth. Bring Your Word down into the thick of my daily choices. Do not let me withdraw from the world out of fear, but give me the strength to enter it with Your assurance and Your gentleness. Keep me united to my brothers and sisters in the Name of the Father, so that Your joy may be in me and that it may be complete. Amen.