Saint John
Jn 20:1a, 2-8
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”
Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in.
Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed;
New Revised Standard Version, copyright 1989, by the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. USCCB approved.
Friendship With Jesus
On this feast of Saint John, how fitting it is that the Gospel passage includes one of the several references to the “disciple whom Jesus loved.” We traditionally understand John to be the one singled out. But within this Gospel that highlights Jesus’ love for John, we also see his other friends attesting to their own bonds– Mary Magdalene’s great concern for the whereabouts of Jesus’ body and Peter’s primacy in entering the tomb. John’s Gospel is after all the one in which Jesus famously called us each his friends.
Consider your own bond with Jesus. Some scholars have proposed that “the disciple whom Jesus loved” is left vague and unnamed so that you and I might more easily see ourselves as his young friend. Jesus wants to hold your closest confidence and share your dearest desires. He wants to be, as the philosophers described friendship, a second self for you. He wants you to be an extension of himself, too, an extension of Christ.
If it is true that a friend is a second self, an extension of oneself, Jesus is not as absent in today’s Gospel passage as he may have first seemed. There he is in the midst of them.
—Adam Bohan, SJ, is a scholastic of the Midwest Province working as a registered nurse in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Loyola University Medical Center.
Prayer
Jesus, draw me into your friendship. Unite my will with your holy will for my life. Help me to be the living expression of your regard for my neighbor, to behold them in right-relationship. St. John, pray for us.
—Adam Bohan, SJ