“I, Me, Mine, You, Yours, Them Theirs”
7 Easter B –
John 17:6-19
Brothers and sisters in Christ, Grace and Peace to you from our Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Just before today's gospel, Jesus makes an interesting prediction to the disciples. He tells them, "you will be scattered, each to his home, and you will leave me alone."
Of course, we know that not only will they leave Jesus alone, but one will betray him and another will deny that he is one of Jesus' disciples. Not once, but three times, Peter will refuse to affirm his relationship to Jesus.
Immediately following Jesus' prediction, Jesus looks to heaven and begins to pray to his Father. If this were a screenplay or a teleplay, this would be the payoff, the golden moment when the hero lays it all on the line: standing up to the bad guys, making the dramatic soliloquy that brings a lump to the throat or a tear to the eye. The stirring speech by the platoon leader to his troops before he goes to his death in battle. The heartrending plea of a parent to a wayward child to come home before it’s too late.
But this isn't melodrama. This is divine drama. What is being revealed here is not the big heart of a hero or the but the infinite and eternal love of God. The love of God the Father for his Son, and the love of God's son for the Father's creatures. And God's only begotten son is one of these creatures, fully human and fully divine.
And how else could the revelation of the heart, the very being, of God be revealed except by the obedient words of prayer from the Son to the Father?
The problem is that, although Jesus prayer is about the disciples and by extension all disciples in all places and times a/k/ you and me. We are only listening in. True, we are an important party in this prayer -- Jesus describes his relationship to us and therefore, the Father's relationship to us. But this is Son to Father, God-to-God talk.
It's like overhearing two people talking about someone, and you're pretty sure it's you, but the people conversing never use a name. It's always them or he or she. Not only is it frustrating, but it's confusing, too. We get so lost in all the pronouns, that we miss the truth that is being revealed -- about Jesus and his father in heaven and how the love between the two of them is about their love for us..
INSERT POWER POINT SLIDES
What this prayer of Jesus reveals is simple -- the love of God. The love of God the Father for his Son, and the love of Father and Son for world, most especially for its human inhabitants. It is about how this world of ours, broken by our sin, remains the object of God’s love, concern, and, yes, his grief. And how the relationship of love between the God the father and the son, by its very nature, reaches out to call us back into right relationship. It calls us home, now to live and love this world that God has created. It calls us home, through death and suffering and joy of this life to a resurrection life, transformed – shaped through – can we say redeemed? Through the love of God in his son Jesus Christ.
Wendell Berry -- Novel about a small town barber in rural
"It was strange that Althey's growing weakness should have brought forth so kind a pleasure to me, but it did. That grief should come and bring joy with it was not something I felt able or even called upon to sort out or understand. I accepted the grief. I accepted the joy. I accepted that they came to me out of the same world."
To accept the world with all its joy and grief is what this prayer of Jesus is all about. Because it is what the Father and Son are all about in the coming of Jesus. The free acceptance of world's joy and grief, because, well, can you ever love anything with taking both the good and the bad?
Berry's barber goes on to say, "Just as a good man would not coerce the love of his wife, God does not coerce the love of His human creatures, not for himself or for the world or for one anotherTo allow that love to exist fully and freely, He must allow it not to exist at all. It is our freedom and his sorrow. To love the world even as much as I could love it would be suffering also, for I would fail. And all the good I know is this: that a man might so love the world that it would break his heart."
This prayer proclaims that God's loving acceptance (call it grace) transforms us and the world through God the Son's free acceptance of the world's joy and suffering and grief. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. . ." Not to conquer it but to redeem it, to clutch it to his heart with the same intimacy that exists between Father and Son.
This prayer, as difficult to follow as it may be at first glance, as repetitious, is Jesus taking John 3:16 and telling his Father in heaven how he understands what it means to give and to love as he is about to undergo suffering, abandonment, grief and death. To have his heart broken on the cross because he so loved this world and because he so loved you. And that this is not the end of the story.
Next week, and for the green weeks of Pentecost that stretch into Novemeber we remember and celebrate the facet of God transforms us where we are in this world. The coming of the Spirit of the resurrected Christ. This greatest of gift we receive is God's love, his very Spirit, stirring in us, firing us up, to live in and love this world without being of this world. To share what God in Christ has done with others. To break us out of ourselves and send into the world in all it joy and grief. We are called to carry Easter into our lives, our loves, our world.
How do we do that? Here's one way.
Jones family grandparents, children, grandchildren going out to eat.
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