This Week: Easter 7B
Gospel: John 17:6-19
The last Sunday of the Easter season is always difficult. It arrives after the Ascension and before Pentecost. It is a kind of theological no man’s land of anticipation. Which makes it vaguely reminiscent of Holy Saturday, but on a Sunday and we have to go on with the show.
There is the impulse, of course, to make this Sunday about the Ascension, or to transfer the Ascension to Sunday, but I am loathe to make such changes.
Let’s take a short detour.
Why do react so strongly? I suspect it is what these kinds of changes represent. I don’t have a problem with the church adapting or making it more present in our lives. What does concern me is the source of our motivation.
The desire to transfer a feast often plays like utility. Because attendance is not so good on a Thursday evening, for example. And we think we are only working with our rational minds. But under it is something else.
Isn’t it mostly fear and laziness? Fear that people are missing something (we **are missing something) and laziness in only bothering to show up on Sundays and in catering to it?
Busy lives are further proof of the same weak excuse that we all love to use—to avoid the truth that showing up for church on a seeming random Thursday evening is a pain in the butt and we’d rather not drive at night/leave the house/go back out. Or that kids sports or school programs are more important to us than church.
This isn’t a jab. Just the nature of our moment, our priorities, and the culture we’re cultivating together.
Alright, back to John 17.
Spending over half of the Easter season in John, with most of that at the Last Supper has a strange glow about it, which offers a mind-bending “when are we?” quality to the endeavor.
It also causes us to lose the threatening energy that surrounds the telling of it when we read it in context.
Jesus is talking to his disciples hours before he will be arrested, abused, and murdered by the state. But the moment is also surrounded by anticipation of this, as a group of religious leaders have started planning to kill him and his pal, Lazarus, after already discrediting the man born blind that Jesus healed.
It isn’t too dramatic to say that in the text, Jesus is talking to his friends surrounded by darkness. And then he prays for them, in front of them, so that they can hear him.
And what does he say to them in this darkness?
That Jesus has protected them. And that the world hates them because they are not of the world.
This idea, of not being “of the world” is not about physical parentage or historical origin, but of allegiance to another way of life. In this case, an allegiance to the way of Jesus which is an allegiance to God’s kingdom and not any of the kingdoms of earth.
We are different.
This is the fundamental message of the gospel. But as I discussed on the podcast, we get this mixed up when we expect Christian practice to dominate the culture.
When we think of our country as fundamentally Christian, our neighbors as all Christian, and the values we esteem as Christian, we then recast this teaching as opposition to the minority, to things we call secular, and against anything that threatens “Christian culture.”
But that rendering looks nothing like what Jesus is speaking to.
In fact, there is a far easier rendering of this gospel as to see that Jesus is protecting people from “the world” when the world itself attempts to produce an evangelical Christian hegemony.
Different is good.
Not in and of itself. But because God wants us to be different than this.
At a time when we still debate about the nature of our orientation, gender, ability, race, and status, the language of change can be problematic. But let us consider that the question of, say, body positivity isn’t what Jesus is discussing here.
When Jesus says we need to be different, he is saying we really do need to change. Not cosmetically. And not only in our hearts and minds. But something more aligned with what we’ve been taught to care about.
Which ultimately makes the conversation adjacent to those other conversations we love to spark, like body positivity or gender affirming care more than directly about them. Which is actually a good thing for people who care about caring for other people. Because that means this also isn’t cover for retro beliefs.
What are the ways of the world that Jesus actually challenges throughout the gospels?
- Propensity for violence and war
- Economic exploitation
- Insufficient healthcare
- Despising of immigrants
- Rejecting people and making them outsiders
This gives us a snapshot of what it actually means to be “of the world”. When we think this stuff is normal.
Jesus wants us to be different.
Precisely because these ways of the world are despised by God.
And this message isn’t easy to hear. And not just by Christian Nationalists. A lot of good people want to defend our propensity for violence and war because the alternative seems anti-military. Or critiquing economic exploitation seems anti-capitalist. In fact, every last bit of this seems downright political!
And that’s because it is!
The root of being Christian, of following Jesus’s Way of Love is a profoundly political act, aligning our values, not with a country’s, but with God’s. And it means literally standing up to injustice.
Being different is political.
Which means being Christian is political.
And also…
Rejecting the politics of Christianity is political. And oppositional to Christ!
Trying to make Christianity harmonious with American life and culture is political!
Calling the politics of our faith political is political!
The way of our world through the late 20th and early 21st Century has been to horrendously act to strip the political character from the moral politics of Jesus. We have subjugated the liberating joy of faith behind a patina of safe, stand-less tradition. But most of-the-worldly of all, we have rendered useless the very word politic.
Jesus was rebellious, zealous, and political.
And he expects his followers to be, too.