What does Jesus have in mind for us after he’s gone? A reflection on the Spirit’s role in bringing us together.
For Sunday
Seventh Sunday of Easter
Collect
O God, the King of glory, you have exalted your only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven: Do not leave us comfortless, but send us your Holy Spirit to strengthen us, and exalt us to that place where our Savior Christ has gone before; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting.
Amen.
Reading
From John 17:20-26
“The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one”
Reflection
This week provides us with the interesting wrinkle of the church calendar. We celebrate the Resurrection for 50 days. But after the first 40 days, we celebrate the Ascension.
In essence, we celebrate Jesus’s return from the dead for six weeks, then we celebrate his ascension into heaven. Only to go back to celebrating Jesus’s return from the dead for one more week.
This year, we get lots of readings from the farewell discourse in John, when Jesus is saying goodbye to the disciples at the Last Supper. And in that bon voyage, he’s preparing them for life without him. It is a touching and significant sequence.
And in this, we have Jesus telling them the next thing God has up that sleeve. Another Advocate. An Advocate as significant as Jesus. We know her as the Holy Spirit.
And this Advocate’s place is to offer the people some of what Jesus offered, but it will be with us much longer. (Which is a whole other thing, by the way.)
That is the work the Spirit is called to do. But what exactly is the goal? What is the big purpose? Jesus says that it is to make us one.
Jesus ties this idea of the people being made one in the Spirit as a reflection of the oneness of Jesus with the Father. What we might say in our own words today might be: “Jesus has given us God’s glory so that we may be one, as the Trinity is one”.
The challenge, of course, is that we can look around and not feel like we’re one. There are so many of us and so many filled with the Spirit, and yet we seem so divided. Perhaps now more than at any other moment in our lifetimes. Is the Spirit failing at her job? That’s a scary thought.
The last two Sundays, however, reminded us of Jesus’s earlier guidance. About keeping Jesus’s command to love. And his leaving peace with us so that we might share it.
What seems to ground Jesus’s final teachings is to pair two central ideas: that we are responsible and that God is offering to help. So the Advocate doesn’t do the work for us, but in us.
Our division doesn’t reflect God’s failure. Just ours. And perhaps most importantly, our failure to hold ourselves, all of us, responsible for the oneness of the cosmos.