The sacred call to walk in love
Easter 7B | John 17:6-19
On Thursday, we celebrated the Ascension of Jesus—one of the seven principal feasts of the church—and the one in which we say goodbye to the physical Jesus. It is a fascinating feast, celebrated forty days after Easter Day.
One of the things Jesus says on his way out is to wait for a special thing that’s coming soon. Be on the lookout for it.
Spoilers: It’s the Holy Spirit. That’s for next week.
But for this week, we’ve skipped ahead in the gospel of John to chapter 17. And what we’ve skipped over is worth noting. For one, he talks a little bit about that special thing, calling it the Advocate. [Which is a great name.]
But the other thing Jesus goes into is the trouble with the world. Specifically that the world around them won’t be keen on them because it’s not too keen on Jesus. After all, he’s preparing to be crucified in about 18 hours.
So our reading today has a real tension in it. A tension about the world that exists and the world as God dreams it to be. And this plays out for humanity as a choice between going along with cultural priorities or with Jesus’s.
We’re extremely aware of the problem here.
What is “of the world” and what isn’t? What counts as “of God”? Isn’t everything God’s?
Well-meaning followers have articulated this strictly, with ascetic tendencies. Spending a lot of time in central Michigan, you can run into multiple Amish communities with differing relationships to the world around them. We can also spend time in Evangelical circles which have their own music, movies, and clothing lines to separate them from the wider (secular) culture.
And yet these acts of separation aren’t entirely substantive. For instance, how is appropriating music from the culture, but sung about Jesus, more “of God” than “of the world”? And how would we know either way?
I think most of this response is too literal.
We can’t separate God from our world any more than we can from public schools without prayer. God’s everywhere and in everything. The divine Trinity is not so easily destroyed (and they really don’t need our protecting, either).
The problem isn’t sacred versus secular or human versus divine. It isn’t church versus state. Nor is it American culture versus Christian culture.
The problem is not something we can label as “the world” and throw it all into a bucket bearing the same label. It is what we see in our own environment that consistently pulls us away from the Dream of God and Jesus’s Way of Love.
Violence, fear, anger, war, brutality, exploitation, hatred, starvation, racism, indignity, are all evils that God condemns. And they are all things that can get us ahead in American culture. Just like they could get people ahead in British culture. And in Roman culture.
This is what it means to be “of the world.”
And it is so clearly why Jesus warns his followers. Directly, at the end of chapter 15, and in this prayer for them to hear in chapter 17.
Jesus is worried that getting along in our world leads us to do bad stuff. Jesus would probably describe federal banking law in 2024 as breaking the ten commandments, for example. Continuing to fund war, mass incarceration, inflated medical bills, and pay-day lenders are other examples.
But it isn’t only about personal temptation. It is about our common character in Christ.
Can we maintain our Chirstliness when it makes us so different?
It should surprise no one that our world so rarely reflects the Dream of God. Because exploitation begets power and power begets control and control begets an illusion of safety, so every people and nation seek exploitation to bring it safety.
It is the same reason a parent seeks what is best for their own children at the expense of others. Rather than make our schools better, for example, we pit parents and children against each other to get into “the best”.
And it is why we pit our children against other children in war. Ignoring how we all will grieve. All mothers and fathers lose when war is on the table. Because we sacrifice our children to Moloch and comfort ourselves by saying we had to. Or worse. We didn’t have to, but they did.
That’s what Jesus means by “of the world.”
When we think violence and exploitation is normal.
And this shows why our sacred vs. secular debate is so confused. Because we’re still stuck on the heresy of Manifest Destiny. That God blesses us as a people or a country and therefore we can do no wrong.
But Jesus implores us to listen to him. That these things may be normalish to our culture, but they grieve God’s heart of love. God’s Dream for us is to love, trust, and hope in creation.
And he has told his followers how to do this throughout his time with them. And we heard it the last two weeks!
Love!
We are all connected to the vine in love. And that God’s love is poured into us through Jesus and in pouring it into each other. This is God’s joy. And God’s joy is manifest in us when we spread joy through our love.
Jesus has just said this to them—and he echoes the teaching in the prayer here—so they can hear it again!
“I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves.”
That our joy, which is his joy, be complete in ourselves, now.
And not outside the world in some picture of perfect heavenly hereafter, but here, in the midst of “the world.”
Jesus wants us to be icons of the Dream.
God’s Dream manifest in us, reflecting the joy at the center of the creator and creation.
That’s the plan.
Which only makes sense when we recognize how messed up things are. When wealth not only divides us, but exploits and dehumanizes all of us. It commodifies every one of us into consumers of goods and citizens of nations at war.
Sharing love, exuding God’s joy, is a mark of profound difference. And it is much harder to be so different.
But it is what marked the disciples as different. And marked the first proto-Christian communities as different. Until Christianity was adopted by Constantine as the religion of empire, it was recognized specifically for its stand against empire.
Now, our complicated, intertwining relationship with empire: with exploitation, power, greed, control: is all the more difficult for us.
At least when we see our part in it is as partner or participant. Jesus accepted the roll of recipient of torture to reveal the true engine of empire. So what do we do?
Live differently.
It takes a wicked humor to delight in a reading like this for Mother’s Day. But we shouldn’t be surprised—for Jesus was the one who said to his own mother that his disciples were his “real” family. And who taught that we must leave our families to follow him.
But I also suspect that our Hallmark vision of motherhood hides the challenge of raising kids to be independent and yet faithful and trusting. To do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God when injustice, malice, and arrogance are celebrated.
Parenting is rough. And a perfect metaphor for God’s relationship to us! That we are called to be better than our basest impulses. To love and respect our neighbors and make things better for them, not just ourselves.
That we have chores and we don’t want to ever do them. So God has to tell us every. single. time. You’re supposed to want to help out around here!
As children of God, we are prone to some serious peer pressure.
It is always fitting on this day to hear the words of Julia Ward Howe, who first sought an international Mother’s Day to gather mothers to stand against war.
“Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take council with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, man as the brother of man, each bearing after his own kind the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.”
Let us remember our kinship with one another and our divine place, knowing the complete joy in the shared love with one another.