Seventh Sunday of Easter
May
16, 2010
Sermon by Pastor Marc Kolden
The
Holy Gospel according to
[Jesus prayed:] I ask
not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me
through their word, that they may all be one.
As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so
that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given
them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that
they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent
me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I desire that those also, whom you
have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given
me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.
“Righteous Father,
the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent
me. I made your name known to them, and
I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in
them, and I in them.”
The
Gospel of the Lord.
Grace
to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
I
happened to be reading an article in a magazine just before I started working
on this sermon; the article was about British espionage during World War
II. The British and the Germans were
constantly spying on each other and intercepting telegrams and documents that
were usually in code, and then trying to break the code. And then each side would send out attempts to
fool the other by sending false messages, and so both sides needed not only
intelligence units but counterintelligence units. And you add that to the spies inside the
enemies’ ranks and double agents, and it got so that nobody really knew for
sure what the others were planning.
Listen
to this: A crafty general of a small
neutral country during World War II, hoping to play off the Germans and the British
against each other, tells the British ambassador that the Germans have broken
the British secret code. “We know they
know our code,” the ambassador replied, “so I only give them things we want
them to think.” So the general went
across the street to the German embassy, where he tells this German ambassador,
“They know that you know their code.”
The German ambassador replied, “We have known for some time that they
knew we knew they had our code, so we have been pretending to be fooled.” So the general returns to the British embassy
and tells the ambassador, “They know you know that they know you know,” and on
and on and on.
That was sort of my response
when I first read the Gospel for this morning.
It just seemed to go back and forth and over and over the same ground
again and again, and eventually it just seemed kind of confusing. And so I read it line-by-line and
sentence-by-sentence, and I began to see a kind of logic in it, sort of the
logic of a spoken word, which many of the gospels were. That is, the only form most people knew them
in the early church was when someone read it to them. The spoken word that said one thing, and then
it’s said again with something added it to it, and then said both of those
again, and added something to it. So
that it builds up in a kind of a way that it would be remembered. And we should remember here that the whole
last several chapters in John, leading up to John 17, have been one long prayer
of Jesus to God the Father, in the presence of the disciples. And this one takes place on the night he was
arrested. So these were his last words
from his earthy ministry to them.
So,
starting right with the beginning, “Father, I pray that all my followers may be
one.” Okay. How so?
Jesus said, “As you are in me, Father, and I am in you, may they also be
in us”; this is oneness of a very close sort as between the Father and the Son. But there’s more. “That they may be one as we are one. I in them and you, Father, in me,” which also
means that “if you’re in me you’re in them, too, Father, that they may become completely
one.” Finally, Jesus prayed that his
followers “also may be one with you, Father, in seeing me being
glorified.” And in John that means
lifted up, but lifted up, above all, on the cross. This is glory because it’s for our
salvation. But that’s not how the world
understands glory.
We have
all those lines about oneness building up.
And then we ask, why oneness?
Well, we can answer that—so the world may believe. But then it gets going again. “So that the world may believe, Father, that
you have sent me.” That was much in
doubt at that time.. Jesus was getting
attacked all the time for being an idolater and someone who didn’t believe in
God, when he called himself “one with the Father. And then, again, “so that the world may know
that you have sent me and have loved them,” the disciples, the followers, “even
as you have loved me, because, the world doesn’t know you, Father. But I and my followers know you and have made
your name known to them. And I, through
them, will continue to make it known, so that the love with which you have
loved me may be in them, and I in you.”
To
summarize, Jesus prays that his followers may be one in a special way, that
involves their entering into the unity or oneness with God the Father and God
the Son, so that the unbelieving world may come to know that God the Father,
out of love, actually did send Jesus, and will continue working toward the goal
that all people will come to know the true God and that they are loved by this
God. But we could have said all that in
about two sentences. Why did Jesus seem
to make it so much more complicated? I
think, who can say, but I think it’s because the oneness he’s praying for,
whether between God the Father and Jesus the Son, or between Jesus and the
disciples, or among the disciples is not any simple consensus, or general
agreement, or similarity, or a majority vote.
Rather, it’s a profound union of the same sort as between God the Father
and the Son of God that is to happen in and amongst all of Jesus’ followers, so
that the world will find their witness persuasive when it is offered to all
people.
There was an early historian in the
Second Century, who was not a Christian but was interested in the Christian
movement, among others. And he wrote
describing how the Christians related to each other, and cared for each other,
and looked out for each other. And he
ended by saying, “See how they love one another.” This is a kind of unity that Jesus is praying
for in which all the parties involved are and will be hugely affected and
changed as well as being subject to suffering and loss and grief, much as was
true of the Father and the Son, when in the crucifixion of Jesus, the Father
experienced the loss of the Son, and the Son experienced being forsaken by his
Father. And might we say the triune God
was never same again; that the crucifixion and the experience of that by the
Father and the Son left a permanent scar in God.
Now, we
have some analogies for a kind of profound unity, which aren’t quite as much as
what Jesus was praying for, but they give us some idea. For example, in the love and the pain of
parents for their children, or in the joyous and also at times painful union of
two people in marriage. Such
relationships exceed all others, we are told, in love and growth and happiness,
but also at times in suffering and sorrow.
Perhaps Jesus’ words in this prayer seem so repetitive because he is
praying about a unique union that will affect us more than we could have ever
known ahead of time. Certainly it was
the case for the original disciples. I
don’t think they had much idea, when he said, “Follow me” the first time and
they went trotting off behind this new prophet, what they were getting
into. But they were changed.
I was
thinking about all of this in the context of the lack of unity among Christians;
whether it be in the ELCA where we can’t achieve even a simple consensus about
so many things; or in our politics, where Christians divide over what we should
be about in praying for our leaders, and voting for them; or in churches that
are torn apart by some horrible pain and recrimination because of sexual abuse;
or where there are other kinds of divisions among Christians that are so bad
that the world just cannot believe in the God that we claim to serve. This Gospel is trying to overcome such
obstacles that we, as believers, have put in Christ’s way.
What
has led to this? Perhaps it’s because,
for many of us, the way in which we first learned to be Christians, to express
our faith, involved belonging to a congregation and going to church and Sunday
school. In the congregation, we were
gathered together in a kind of oneness.
We found support our faith through worship and education and friendship
and service. Belonging to a congregation
encouraged us to be concerned for evangelizing the world and for the well-being
of all people. Belonging meant and means
that there will be people that stand by us in bad days and rejoice with us in
good ones. And while belonging to a congregation
can be a very important thing, it can also be more of a formality. And I think many of us over a lifetime have
experienced that: both times of belonging that are truly good and fulfilling
and other times when we think we could just do without it. Somehow belonging is not a sufficient term by
which to understand the deep oneness that Jesus was praying for.
So I went back
and I read this lesson again, and I
started underlining a word. And it
jumped out at me. It appears nine times
in these few verses. But it’s such a
little word that I had been reading right by it. The word is “in,” “i-n.” “In.”
“Believe in me,” Jesus says.
“You, Father, are in me, and I am in you. May the disciples also be in us.” And again, “I in you and you in me, Father.” And finally in the last verse, “that the love
with which you have loved me, Father, may be in them, and I in them..” This being “in Christ” or in the Father, or
Jesus being in his followers is different from belonging to someone or
something. Jesus the Son and God the
Father aren’t said to belong to each other.
Husbands and wives don’t belong to each other either. The Bible says they become one flesh, but
neither belongs in that kind of sense to the other. Rather God the Father and the Son are in each
other. Each one of them is said to be in
us.
And
here I realized it was very similar to what John had written a couple chapters
early in the Gospel, in Chapter 15, the image of the vine and the
branches. Jesus Christ is the vine and
we are the branches. We are in him and
he is in us. And he said, “Abide”— stay, remain—“in me, as I abide in you.” A
branch cannot bear fruit unless it’s hooked on and abides in the vine. “And neither can you, disciples, bear fruit
through the works that result from faith unless you abide in me.” “And whoever does not abide in me is thrown
away like a branch torn from the vine and it withers and dies.”
There’s
a connection here that is organic; it’s part of who you are. I think all of this language is kind of old,
yet very important, and at the same time much forgotten. It means that all our belonging, doing,
working, worshiping, and trying to be one by seeking the unity of all
Christians doesn’t mean much if we’re not first joined to Christ as our Lord and
Savior. The traditional language about
this—to have Jesus in your heart, or to have a personal relationship to Jesus—may
sound old fashioned or even corny. But
it gets at what is essential. It is
where the other things will all fall into place.
Think
about that first lesson from Acts 16, when the Apostle Paul and Silas did not
run out of the jail when the earthquake hit, and the jailer comes up worried
about his well-being, because he is going to be punished for losing the
prisoners. And they’re all there. And then he falls on his knees and said,
“What must I do to be saved?” And they
say to the jailer, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.” That word “saved” in Greek and Hebrew is not
just saved for some eternal life down the way awhile, but it means more like to
be made whole. It means to be healed; to
become more of what God intended us to be all along. And then in his letter to the Galatians Paul
wrote, “It is no longer I who live but it is Christ who lives in me, and the
life I now live I live by faith and trust in the Son of God.” I wonder if that’s why Paul prayed so much in
his epistles. He starts off with a
prayer, he mentions prayer. He ends up
with lots of prayers, thanking everybody for everything, but especially God for
what he has done. He lives by faith in
Christ.
Jesus’
last words to his disciples during his earthy ministry were his prayer for each
of them; and now, today, for each one of us, that we may be one, as he and the
Father are one, so that the world may believe.
The spirit of God is here this morning, using Jesus’ words in scripture
to speak to us and bring about in us a change of heart, faith, and new
insight. And in a few minutes we will
receive Jesus’ body and blood for the forgiveness of our sins, new life, and
salvation, so let us abide in him as he abides in us.
Let us
pray.
Gracious
God, you came to us in Jesus Christ when we were baptized into him and you
bestowed on us your Holy Spirit, the Spirit who makes Christ come alive in each
of us. We confess that we have often
failed to remember this and failed to live in unity with you. Forgive us; and restore us to a right
relationship to you, above all, so that our witness to you may be persuasive
and we may bear fruit that will be a blessing to your church and to your
world.
We pray
in the name of Jesus, who is our Savior and Lord. Amen