a Homily for Easter 7B
Text: John 17:6-19

Jesus leaves twice. We forget that. We celebrate Jesus dying and rising again. But Jesus doesn’t rise like a ghost on the way up to the clouds. Jesus comes to his disciples and clears the air.

Think of it this way. In preparing for his death, Jesus teaches his disciples everything He can think of. He teaches them how to pray. He shows them what they will need to do. He prepares them for life without Him. Then he succumbs to His fate.

And then He comes back. They are excited to see Him. They greet Him as the savior and liberator they always knew Him to be. And what does He do during this time? [He opens the Scripture to them]. Remember last week’s gospel? Jesus says to His disciples you used to be slaves but now you are friends. Do you remember what was different? [They knew and understood what GOD was doing]. So this time after the Resurrection is about what? Syncing up with GOD; understanding the mission; getting it.

In this gospel pericope we are exposed to finality: when Jesus leaves.

The astute scholar will point out that this, like the last few pericopes occur before Jesus dies and is raised. But they speak of the matter of our mission, and relate to what we’ve already learned about this brief time between the rising and the ascending. They deal with a post-Jesus faith.

So why is this day, the Sunday after the Ascension significant?

Because Jesus leaves. No more teaching.

And what does Jesus leave behind?

His people.

We hear in that prayer that Jesus prayed about protecting and serving His people. That they were GOD’s people, on loan to Him. And Jesus prays about protecting and preserving them. So that they may go into the world to do GOD’s mission as Jesus went into the world to do GOD’s mission.

We’re reading this gospel pericope because it deals with Jesus leaving His people for good. On Ascension Day, which was Thursday, we had a reading about Jesus’s actual ascent. Anyone born after the Enlightenment has trouble with the image of Jesus physically floating up into heaven. It doesn’t speak our language. There are too many variables for us to make sense of it and we are much more likely to dismiss it as “old thinking” from the ancient world. Instead, we get a much better story about Jesus leaving for good.

We’ve inherited a church in which Jesus has left for good already. We have to deal with a Jesus revealed in our community, in our scriptures, and in our storytelling. We encounter Jesus in other people and are put in the position of being another person’s encounter with Jesus.

Our readings have been building to this moment.

• For Easter, we read about Mary telling the Good News of the resurrected Christ to the disciples.
• Then, we read gospel pericopes about the disciples needing to tell the story of Jesus’s resurrection to Thomas because he wasn’t there.
• Then we read a gospel about Jesus as “the good shepherd” and I had us reflect on what a leaderless group looks like and what that meant for the early Christians to be without Jesus physically there to lead them.

This is where all of this comes to bear at the end of the Easter Season. We are preparing for the part in the story in which Jesus leaves a second time and two thousand years later has yet to return in a physical form.

If you were here at the Great Vigil of Easter or the morning after, I preached about how the gospel we know as Mark concludes well before we expect it to. We learned how open-ended Easter truly is for Christians. As Easter concludes, we are marked with a similar invocation of an open-ended, spirit-led mission. And yet now, it is much clearer. We do know our mission. We do know what is expected of us. We do know GOD. We are invited to bear fruit in this world and grow a healthy church, while living vibrant lives inspired by the Spirit. This has been revealed to us. This is the work of the Easter season.

We can imagine how different the second departure is from the first. The first, all tears and fears. The disciples, all huddling together in the upper room, waiting, hoping, confused. But mostly waiting—waiting for direction, for an understanding of what to do and where to go and who to be. So when Jesus comes back, He doesn’t tell them any of those things. He reminds them of what they already knew.

Then he leaves. For good.

And you know that second departure isn’t frightening or bitter. They feel something different.

Relieved.

For us, as we remember Jesus’s second departure, we can share in that feeling of relief. Because we know what to do. We know what the mission is. We are being called to go out and do it.

Do you feel that? On your skin? On the hairs on your arms? That static electricity? That’s because there’s something in the air. A mighty wind is coming.