Sermon for the 7th Sunday of Easter – 24th May 2020: Acts 1, 6-14; John 17, 1-11

Revd Canon Leonard Doolan, St Paul’s Athens

 

There is a chunk of chapters in St. John’s gospel referred to as the ‘Final Discourses’.  In St. John’s ‘real time events’ these occur between the washing of the disciples’ feet at the Last Supper, and the betrayal and arrest of Jesus.

This material is unique to St. John. You won’t find it anywhere in the other three gospels. Who heard all this unique material and how was it recorded? The transmission of this material is as much a mystery as the cross itself! It is a rich resource of sayings, and it reflects the author’s absolute conviction that Jesus is not just a carpenter’s son from Nazareth who could tell a good rabbinical story, or achieve a miracle like so many other miracle workers, or thaumaturges that abounded in this culture.

These discourses of St. John are the words of the Christ who inhabits the kosmos and is Pantocrator. We might say that it is all the difference between the Jesus of history (however well we can redact and recreate this person), and the Christ of the Church who is Logos (the Word) and Second Person of the Trinity. Either there is a huge gulf between these two realities, or one is so integral to the other that it is not possible to find anything in the hinterland. This is the final conclusion that the early church concluded, and is now formulated in our Creeds. Faith alone can interpret, calibrate and reconcile these two poles, the human and the divine. To accept, or even at a push to understand the Christ mystery, nothing is gained by making a choice between one pole and another; but everything is to be gained for the human individual and society by simply living with the paradox of both. A rich, fertile, imaginative, and well-formed mind, or even a humble mind, can comfortably achieve this. We don’t have to be ‘psychotic’ to live creatively with Jesus, and the Logos of God made flesh.

Within these Final Discourses, Jesus speaks to his disciples. It is all during that final meal. He tells them about love and service, and washes their feet; there is a new commandment that shifts faith in God away from ‘doing religious rituals’ to love of God and neighbour; he is the Way, the Truth and Life; and he is the True Vine. No mention of any flask of wine or a cup, but rather the vine from which the wine comes – it is he, and he alone. He tells them of the forthcoming ‘Pentecost experience’ but this is a churchy shorthand, because for St. John there is no waiting period of 50 days.

After vouchsafing this material to his disciples, Jesus then addresses God, his Father. This is the chapter set for our gospel reading today. We often refer to this as the ‘high priestly prayer of Jesus’. The words are an anointing in their own right. They crown humanity in their priestly vocation. You, me, each of us, through baptism and in the faith of this Christ who would be crucified and raised, become ennobled, dignified, anointed, ‘coronated’. In short we become what God intends us to be. We are called to live in the world, rooted and grounded in creation, yet we are all called to share a priestly life, a life of sacrifice and offering.

I repeat what I said in last week’s sermon, because it is so good, so right, so meet. In a little monograph Metropolitan Kallistos Ware says this, ‘We may regard man as an animal that weeps and laughs; or with the Stoics, as a logical or rational animal (λογικόν ζώον); or with Aristotle as a political animal (πολιτκόν ζώον). But we come closer to the heart of the matter if we think of man as a Eucharistic or priestly animal…endowed with the vocation of offering the world back to God… in a continuing act of joyful doxology.’ (The Beginning of the Day, Kallistos Ware, Akritas, 2007 p45)

It is this humanity that Christ offers in prayer to God our Father and his supreme intercession is that we should be united with God our Father as he and the Father are united. His prayer is that we should be fully reconciled with our Creator, the one in whose image of glory and love we are created; fully reconciled to the one who has given us ‘dominion’, a special vocation to care for the earth and all that has been given to us in the continuing creational love of the Father.

 

It is not only that he lives and prays for this unity with God, but he also dies on the cross for this unity with God, so that we may also die to ourselves and be ‘reborn’ as participators in the new creation and with the first-born of this new Creation, Jesus the Christ. Our unity with God the Father is our returning home to the household from which we have estranged. It is to this home that Christ representationally returns when he is said to ‘ascend into heaven’ – he is in effect entering home again.

This COVID-19 period in our lives has brought much heartache, anxiety, isolation, loneliness, mental stress, sickness, loss of loved ones and death on a global scale. It has also created some space, ironically, for humour – thanks be to God! To the question, ‘What is the Ascension of Jesus all about?’ this COVID-19 period answer is, ‘that’s when Jesus started to work from home’.

The high priestly prayer of Jesus, John 17, is worth reading and reading again. It conveys to us the very core of humanity’s calling and purpose.

We are always told that a good sermon takes a text of scripture and shows its contemporary application – otherwise the sermon may fall into the danger of being arcane and irrelevant. To borrow a phrase from the world of German biblical criticism, we should give a text a contemporary sitz im leben – a real setting.

Today, it might seem, we have dipped a toe into the pool of the theology of the ‘high priestly prayer’, and so far there has been no practical application, no sitz im leben but I would beg to differ.

This prayer of Christ takes us to the very heart of who we are in relation to the one who creates us. It takes us to the deepest meaning of who we are in relation to the creation of which we are such a crowning glory. It takes us to a deep understanding of who we are in relation to the ‘other’. To quote the great phrase of St. Ireneus, (Bishop of Lugdunum [Lyon]) in the 2^nd century, ‘The glory of God is man, fully alive.’

How else can we apply ourselves with full passion to the environmental issues facing us in this generation; how else can we form a truly noble self -image in a world whose advertising and obsession with celebrity and wealth contributes disproportionately  to the perception of who we are and what we should have; in a world where the ‘selfie’ has a higher profile than the self,  how else can we hope to have  any coherent sense of healed community and whole relationships founded on the most profound understanding of the very identity of humanity.

Surely a study of John 17, Christ’s prayer for us, can only be the most relevant of exercises for us; and with these sacred insights surely there can only be a more informed and more impassioned relationship with God, the creation, with ourselves and one another. How can we begin to respond to the major global challenges if we don’t start from where Christ is. ‘Father, may they be one, as we are one’. (John 17, 11).