St. John (2025 Ed.)

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

St. John the Apostle was a native of Bethsaida, a Galilean town on the northern shore of the Sea of Tiberias. His parents were Zebedee and Salome, and his brother was St. James the Greater.

They were a well-to-do family of fisherfolk, who, when they met Our Lord, put themselves completely and unhesitatingly at His disposal.

We’re told that John and James, in reply to Our Lord’s call, “left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants and followed him” (Mark 1:20). Salome, their mother, also followed Jesus, helping Him with her possessions in Galilee and Jerusalem, and accompanying Him even to Calvary (Mark 15:40).

John had been a disciple of the Baptist when he was baptizing in the Jordan, until one day Jesus passed close by and the Precursor pointed Him out: “‘Behold, the Lamb of God!’ The two disciples heard him say that and they followed Jesus” (John 1:36-37).

And we’re told in St. John, “They stayed with him that day” (John 1:39). St. John never forgot that meeting. In his Gospel, he hasn’t told us what he talked about with the Master that day. We only know that he never left Him again.

When, as a very old man, he wrote his Gospel, he couldn’t resist putting in the very hour of that first meeting with Jesus. He said, “It was about the tenth hour” (John 1:39), by our time about four o’clock in the afternoon. It was a very special moment in his life.

We could ask “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (John 13:23, 19:26, 21:7, 21:20) about our own Christian vocation, about the callings that God has made to us in our life, our baptismal calling, maybe our marriage calling, our professional calling, our apostolic calling; the moments when Jesus has spoken to us in a deeper way; the instruments that He has used to get His message across. All are very important and decisive moments in our life, moments of special grace.

He went back home to his home in Bethsaida, to his work as a fisherman. Soon afterwards Our Lord, having already prepared him at that first meeting, called him specifically to be one of the group of the Twelve.

We see this vocation as a process. And if we look back in the course of our life, we cast a contemplative gaze, we may also be able to identify certain key moments in our life where God used people and places and events to shape our being in a special way.

In the Christmas of 1971, I think it was, I went on an excursion with a group of maybe, fifteen guys to an island off the west coast of Ireland with a priest who was well known for speaking about “the road of life.”

On the other side of this island, there was an old Celtic fortress called Dún Aonghasa. You take a road that meanders across the island, a slight uphill climb. And when you get to the other side of the island, to that fortress, you’re able to look back and see the road you’ve traveled.

This priest, in a meditation around that time, liked to say, “When you look along that road that you’ve traveled, it’s a bit like the road of life, with its twists and turns. Each twist and turn of that road that has brought us to where we are is like a twist and turn in our life, the different influences that have shaped our being, shaped our existence. And that road of life has led us to where we are. When you look back, you see the road of life and you see it very clearly. It makes an awful lot of sense.”

But in that particular place, when you reach the old fortress, you’ve reached the end of the road. There’s a big cliff edge that goes down a few hundred meters. You’ve got to get down on your hands and knees and peer over the edge of the cliff, because there’s a wind there that blows in from the Atlantic, from Boston. It hits up against the cliff edge and could lift you out of it if you’re not careful.

So you look back, and everything seems to make an awful lot of sense. And you look forward and nothing makes any sense at all. God has brought me to this particular point in the road, but there’s no more road.

This priest said, “You look over the edge of the cliff, and you see the waves crashing against the rocks down below. It’s a tremendous sight. But that’s with your human outlook, with your human vision. But if you lift up your eyes with supernatural vision, you find that Our Lady is standing a few meters out from the edge of the cliff, and she has her arms open and she’s saying, ‘Jump. Jump off the cliff into my arms.’”

This priest said following a vocation is like jumping off a cliff, leaving everything behind, making an act of faith. It’s true for every marriage vocation. It’s true for every professional vocation. It’s true for every vocation to the celibate life.

God wants us to jump off the cliff, but Our Lady is there to catch us. It may be that certain times in our life, Our Lord puts us back on the edge of the cliff and says, “Jump again. Make a new act of commitment in your life, in your vocation. A new act of generosity, a new act of sacrifice, a total self-giving. Show me again that you really want to love me, that you really want to give your life totally to me.”

St. John, by far the youngest of the apostles—he wasn’t twenty when he answered Our Lord’s calling—he did so with all his heart, with a love that was undivided, exclusively for Jesus.

St. Josemaría likes to say that we have to have a heart like that of St. John, a spiritual life like that of St. John. He gave himself completely. He never looked back. And he was the only apostle that was there at the foot of the Cross, faithful to the end (John 19:26-27). All the others had run away.

On this feast of the disciple whom Jesus loved, we could ask Our Lord that we might have that refinement of St. John, that youthful self-giving, which increases with the passage of years. Do we say “yes” to Our Lord, jumping off the cliff again with even greater commitment?

I met an elderly Loreto nun recently, 84 years of age, who recently came back to Kenya after a few months in her homeland. She said, “I’ve come back with more missionary zeal than ever before.” It’s a beautiful thing to hear at 84 years of age. That youthful self-giving can be ours. It’s ours for the taking. We can ask Our Lord for that grace.

St. John’s vocation gave a new meaning to his whole existence, even to the most ordinary things. That’s what our vocation does. Each day is a new adventure, a new self-giving to God, a new opportunity to correspond more to the graces that God gives us.

The whole of life is affected by Our Lord’s plans for each one of us. “The discovery of our own personal vocation [what the will of God is for us in our life], is the most important point in each person’s existence” (Federico Suarez, Mary of Nazareth).

There may be ups and downs, crosses, contradictions in that discovery, but it’s a moment of great significance.

A number of years ago, I knew a family in the Philippines whose daughter was studying in the States. One day she was being driven, I think to university, and somehow the car skidded off the road, it was winter, it ended up a tree. She went into a coma. She died three or four days later.

The body was brought back to the Philippines. I did the funeral. But she was engaged to be married. She was a 28-year-old girl, her fiancé was 28 years of age. I remember the big question mark look on his face during that funeral. This is not how love stories are meant to end. It was a great tragedy in some ways.

But a few months later, he was going back to the States where he worked. He was passing through the San Francisco airport. I’ve never been there, but it seems there are two underground tunnels connecting different terminal buildings. And there’s a specific moment where those two tunnels intersect each other.

Precisely at that moment, at the intersection, he bumped into an acquaintance who was coming along a different tunnel. He had met her at a few parties. She was an acquaintance of his former fiancée. He was heading to Houston, she was going to New York. They were crisscrossing the States. They swapped phone numbers. Three months later, he gave her a call just to say hi. Today, they’re married with four children.

I often like to tell people, if ever you’re passing through San Francisco airport, take a good look left and take a good look right. You never know what may be coming.

God is acting always in our lives, working out that specific moment that He has planned for all eternity for us to meet that person that we’re destined to meet, or for us to see very clearly what His plan for us is.

St. John, may you help us in seeing those graces, in seeing those plans of God and in corresponding to them.

When we see that light, one spiritual writer says, “it changes everything without in some ways changing anything, just as a landscape, without changing, is different before and after the sun goes down, beneath the light of the moon, or wrapped in the darkness of night. Every discovery gives a new beauty to things, and a new light creates new shadows; one discovery is the prelude to other discoveries of new lights and more beauty” (ibid.).

John’s whole life was centered on his Lord and Master; in his faithfulness to Jesus, he found the meaning of his life.

Jesus, may I see more clearly every day the meaning of my life. Help me to help many other people around me to find that meaning. We live in a world, in a society, that is craving for meaning.

John put up no resistance of any kind to his calling; he was found on Calvary when all the others disappeared. When the Cross came, he was there.

That’s what our life has to be like, because even though Our Lord calls some people in a special way, all His preaching speaks of vocation, of an invitation to follow Him into a new life whose secret He possesses: “If any man would come after me, let him take up his cross and follow me” (Matt. 16:24). He can be my disciple.

Our Lord has chosen all of us (Rom. 1:7)—some of us with a specific vocation—to follow Him, to imitate Him, and to carry on in the world the work of His Redemption. And from all of us He expects a joyful and unshakable faithfulness like St. John’s, even in the most difficult moments.

At a meeting of priests in Singapore, an elderly Belgian missionary priest stood up—we were talking about vocation—and he said, “I learned the meaning of vocation as a young priest on my first missionary assignment in the United States. I got to know a young couple. They were 25 years of age. The woman’s name was Nancy. And they were having their first baby, and the baby turned out to be a Down’s syndrome baby. The doctor said to the mother, ‘Are you willing to accept this baby? I can’t tell you that it’s going to be easy. But I can tell you that for every ounce of love that you put into this baby, you’re going to get a pound of love in return.’ And Nancy said, ‘Yes, we’re ready to accept whatever comes.’”

This elderly priest said, “I was very moved by that.” You could see the Holy Spirit was speaking to him and he realized it. He said, “I realized that’s the meaning of vocation: to be ready to accept whatever comes. I learned the meaning of vocation not in the seminary, but from that young married couple and particularly that young married mother.

“A couple of years later, I was asked to go and work in Rome and handle the legal, architectural, financial work of our organization all over the world, and work behind a desk.

“One day somebody came to me and said, ‘What are you doing working behind a desk in Rome? You’re supposed to be a missionary. Why aren’t you off in Alaska or Brazil someplace?’ I got my answer from Nancy. I don’t particularly like this job. I’d much prefer to be somewhere else, anywhere else but here, any other time but now, any other job but this. But I try to accept whatever comes.”

If somebody came along to our organization and said, “I’m willing to join your organization as long as I can do all the jobs that I like, and be in the places that I like, at the times that I want”—he’d be told, “I’m sorry, you don’t have a vocation to our organization. Part of the deal is that you have to be ready to accept whatever comes.”

St. John, the beloved disciple, reclined close to the Lord at the Last Supper (John 13:23). That position is interesting. Peter was not the one that was beside Jesus. The youthful heart of John won for himself that place beside Jesus, resting his head on the chest of Our Lord. Secrets of heaven were revealed to him.

We’re told in the Entrance Antiphon of today’s Mass, “Secrets of heaven were revealed to him, and he proclaimed the message of eternal life throughout the world.”

We can be grateful for the influence the Gospel of St. John has had on our life. Every time we read any of the Gospels at Mass or in our own personal Gospel reading, it’s worthwhile thinking how these documents have lasted two thousand years.

The effort that John made to write his Gospel, like the other evangelists, have shaped the hearts and minds and souls of Christians for two thousand years.

St. John, help us to have a similar lasting legacy. Thank you for the effort you made in writing so many beautiful and inspiring things.

St. John refers to himself discreetly as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” He puts himself in the third person. In a discreet way, he lets us know that Jesus had a special affection for him because He saw this noble, pure heart of John, so faithful.

When he recorded that solemn moment at the Last Supper when Jesus announced that one of the Twelve was going to betray Him, John didn’t hesitate to ask Our Lord, leaning against his chest, who it was who would be the traitor (John 13:23).

Our Lord’s supreme expression of confidence in the beloved disciple took place when, from the Cross, He entrusted to him the greatest love that He had on earth: His Holy Mother. “Son, behold your mother.”

If the most outstanding moment in John’s life was that in which Jesus called him to leave all things and follow Him, there on Calvary, he received a more refined and intimate charge: that of caring for the Mother of God.

In the last encyclical of John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia (The Sacrament of Redemption), he describes the Masses that John must have said after Our Lord’s Ascension, in the presence of Our Lady, when he would have had the privilege of giving the Body of Christ to the Mother of God, and the fervor with which Our Lady would have received the Body of Christ (cf. John Paul II, Encyclical, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, Point 56, April 17, 2003). Interesting idea for our contemplation.

Jesus gives His Mother to him to care in a special way, a very important charge (John 19:26-27). Lord, help us to also take care of your Mother as well.

We’re told, “From that hour, the disciple took her to his own home” (John 19:27). To St. John, as to no one else, Our Lady could talk about all those things which she kept in her heart (Luke 2:51).

Today on his feast, we can look at “the disciple whom Jesus loved” with a holy envy for the immense gift which the Lord bestowed on him; and, at the same time, we have to thank him for the care which he took of her until the end of her days here on earth.

John, may you give us the devotion to Our Lady that you had. May we listen to her when she speaks to us. May we also discover the treasures of her heart.

All Christians, represented by John, have become the children of Mary. We can learn from him to treat her with trustful confidence.

He, “the disciple whom Jesus loved, brought Mary into his home, into his life” (J. Escrivá, Christ Is Passing By, Point 140).

St. John, may you help us to do that more effectively every day.

St. Josemaría says, “Spiritual writers have seen these words of the Gospel as an invitation to all Christians to bring Mary into their lives. Mary certainly wants us to invoke her, to approach her confidently, to appeal to her as Our Mother, asking her to ‘show that you are Our Mother’—monstra te esse Matrem!” (ibid., Hymn, Ave Maris Stella).

We can also imagine the enormous influence that Our Lady must have had on the soul of the young Apostle. We can get a more adequate idea of it by remembering those periods in our life—and perhaps this current moment is one of them—when we ourselves have turned to the Mother of God and had an especially close relationship with her.

Mary, thank you for being in our life. Help us to look upon you as the woman in my life more and more, as Our Mother.

A few days after Our Lord’s Resurrection, some of His disciples met together by the Sea of Tiberias in Galilee, obeying the instructions which the risen Jesus had given to them (cf. Matt. 28:7). They had gone back to their work as fishermen. Among them were John and Peter.

Our Lord went to look for His friends. The Gospel paints us a moving picture of Jesus with the men who, in spite of everything, had remained faithful.

“He passes by, close to his Apostles, close to those souls who have given themselves to him, and they don’t realize that he is there. How often Christ is not only near us, but in us; yet we still live in such a human way! …

“The disciples recall what they have heard so often from their Master’s lips: fishers of men. [‘Come, follow me and I will make you into fishers of men.’] And they realize that all things are possible, because it is he who is directing their fishing” (Josemaría Escrivá, Friends of God, Points 265,266).

They look at this stranger on the shore who has told them to cast the net to the other side of the boat. They take in this vast amount of fish, and then they look again at this stranger on the shore.

We’re told, “Whereupon the disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter: ‘It is the Lord’” (John 21:7).

The noble, pure, sincere heart of John is the first to recognize the Master. “Love is farsighted. Love is the first to appreciate kindness,” St. Josemaría says.

“The adolescent Apostle, who felt a deep and firm affection for Jesus, because he loved Christ with all the purity and tenderness of a heart that had never been corrupted, exclaimed, ‘It is the Lord!’ Simon Peter, hearing him say that it was the Lord, girded up his fisherman’s coat and sprang into the sea.’ Peter personifies faith. Full of marvelous daring, he leaps into the sea. With a love like John’s and a faith like Peter’s, what is there that can stop us?” (ibid., Point 266).

That cry, “It is the Lord,” you could say is a cry that has arisen from our hearts too, in the middle of our work, when we’re ill, in all our dealings with the people who share our lives. We also see the hand of God at work.

We can ask St. John to teach us to recognize Christ’s face in the middle of all the realities which surround us, because He’s very near to us and He alone is able to give meaning to all the things that we do.

The Navarre Bible tells us that in addition to what we learn from Sacred Scripture, Tradition hands down to us some details which confirm the great care which St. John took to preserve the purity of doctrine and his faithfulness to the commandment of fraternal love.

St. Jerome tells us that when John was very old, he repeated again and again to the disciples who came to see him, “Little children, love one another” (cf. 1 John 4:7,11,12). They asked him why he always went on repeating the same thing. He answered, “It is the Lord’s commandment, and if that is kept, it is enough” (St. Jerome, Commentary on the Galatians).

We can ask St. John for many things today: especially that young people may search for Christ, meet Him, and have the generosity to follow Him when He calls.

We can ask him, too, to intercede with Our Lord so that we may be as faithful as he was; that we may show the Successor of Peter the same love and respect which he showed the first Vicar of Christ on earth; that he may teach us to treat Mary, the Mother of God and Our Mother, with more love and confidence.

We ask him that the people around us may be able to tell that we are disciples of Jesus by the way in which we treat them.

“O God, you disclosed to us the secrets of your eternal Word through your beloved apostle John. Grant us the power to understand his sublime teaching” (cf. Roman Missal, Collect, Proper Mass for December 27).

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

MVF