For Sunday
Easter 7B
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
Reflection
Jesus is preparing for departure. Once they finish dinner, Jesus will head to the garden, where he will be betrayed, arrested, tried, and executed. The events we call the Passion of Christ. And in this passage, we find Jesus praying for his followers. That they continue what they have been taught, commanded to love.
When Jesus says “I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves,” last week’s gospel is certainly ringing in our ears. A teaching about joy coming from love—that joy is what God wants for us. That we will know joy when we love one another.
Now, Jesus praying that their joy be complete. In them. As Jesus’s love and joy exists within them as an indwelling.
There is a natural tension for the reader here. Because goodbyes are always sad and a little bit scary. The promise that we’re ready, or that we have what we need is small comfort when we are pretty confident that we’d just rather have the security of his presence with us.
It’s funny, though, to think we can have that permanence, security. To compare the real to the impossible like it is a fair debate. As if the impossibility of total security gets to be something we long for. And then, at the same time, we hold Jesus’s promise of joy in the Advocate as an unknown possibility.
This, of course, is the nature of faith. Not that we are invited to hope for the impossible. But that we trust in the possible in light of a culture that already believes the impossible. Our security is in the love and joy of Jesus. A joy made complete through our love of one another in all circumstances.