Just for the Record, John 17:1-11

Just for the record, I hate it when the text for the day begins with, “When Jesus finished saying these things…”. I find it distracting and a little irritating because I immediately wonder, “What did Jesus just say?”

Well for the record, between last week’s text and this week’s text, Jesus has been instructing his disciples. We do not know for sure where they are, but we do know that this is Jesus’ farewell address that builds on verse 13:34 and has continued through this chapter—chapter 17. So, we have heard about the great vine; you know, “I am the vine and you are the branches.” We have heard that Jesus is in the world, but not of it. We have heard that the world hates Jesus and his witness and that, if we follow Jesus’ commandment, that is to love one another as Christ has first loved us, and if we bear witness to who Jesus is and continue in his teachings, then we can be hated too. If that weren’t enough, then Jesus said, “The time…has come when you will be scattered, each one to his home, and you will leave me alone, yet I am not alone because the Father is with me. I have said this to you so that in me you will have peace. In the world you face persecution, but take courage, I have conquered the world.”

Okay, now we have the context for understanding “After Jesus had spoken these words…”. What follows is an amazing prayer: a prayer for oneness and that we might come to know eternal life, more literally, life that will go on through the ages. And then Jesus tells us what this everlasting life, this life in the ages is: it is knowing the Father and his son Jesus Christ.

Now, I don’t know about you, but, when I first think of eternal life, even life into the ages, I’m thinking heaven. Yeah, heaven’s a nice place to go, so let’s go with that. But Jesus upsets this idea of place with an understanding of relationship. Life that goes on into the ages, what we translate as eternal life, is not a where but a what and a who. It is not a place but a relationship with Godself. And this is eternal life: that you know the Father and his son, Jesus Christ. Why? Because, without Christ, we have no life with any kind of future, not even life in the present.

With these words, Jesus reminds us of what we heard in John at Christmas: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was Life, and the Life was the light of all people. The light, in the darkness shines, and the darkness has not overcome it.…To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.”

As John understands it there is no life without God, but John is not proposing some abstract philosophy. He is referring us all the way back to Genesis, to the sixth day of creation when God creates humanity in God’s own image, male and female. Without God, there is no life, and, without Christ, there is no new creation. This new life we know in the resurrected Christ, God has revealed to us in the person of Jesus who preaches to us and teaches us and prays for us to know the primary, primal relationship with the Father and his son, Jesus the Christ.

In this amazing prayer, Jesus prays that we know the Father and the son. This is not just a “be aware of”, “casual acquaintance with”, but an “intimate relationship” knowing. In fact, the intimacy of this knowing is likened to the relationship of sexual intimacy in most of Scripture. I do not use these words lightly. Jesus wants us to have such an intimate relationship with God that we will not question it, a relationship that understands God well enough to be able to finish the sentences of life and creation that God begins. Jesus wants us to have a relationship that fully embraces the understanding that we are created in God’s image—not just the beautiful people, but all of us. All of us are created in God’s image—those of us who walk with walkers, who sit in wheel chairs; the blind, the deaf, the broken; black, white, and all of the shades and hues that come from God’s vibrant color palette; gay, straight and other sexual identities. All of us are created in the image of God, and, in God, we find the many gifts of life being continually given.

This is the life that Jesus prays for us. And, if we know that we are created in God’s image and we are one with Christ and in Christ, then all we need to do to know what God looks like is to look around us, to reach out and greet those whom Christ has given us to walk through life WITH. If you want to get a little freaked, then think about God’s image the next time you look in a mirror. Do not be confused. You are not God, but you are made in the image of God.

When we know this, then God will give us his name, the name first given to Jesus. Jesus is given the name or title, Son of God. So, what is that name for us? It is Children of God. Individually we are claimed as sons and daughters just as Jesus is claimed. We hear those words echoing down from the beginning of John, “To those who believe in God’s name he gives the power to become the Children of God.”

In the waters of Baptism, we claim that intimate relationship of being child of God through the dying and rising into new life IN the Father, and IN the son, and IN the Holy Spirit. From the waters of baptism, we live; we walk as the children of God in this named identity that God has given us in God’s life. That is the relationship that Jesus is praying for us.

We are God’s children. We are called to be one with one another and with Christ. In this amazing oneness, this wholeness that Jesus is talking about, we are called to be one with one another in the world, not for the sake of the world, but for our sake. This holy oneness is not some hypothetical circumstance of the future. It is something that Jesus prays for at that very moment, that his disciples might know unity in who they are, in whose they are, and what they are going to do about it.

So often, we think that the disciples and Jesus’ other followers had it all together. We think that they had this wonderful relationship with Jesus and one another so that there must have been at least that small period of time when people were at peace with one another. Seriously, Jesus was there. Why wouldn’t there be peace at that time?

What we discover in Scripture though is that everybody was arguing with everybody else. Even the disciples continued to have arguments among themselves over who was the greatest, how should the money they collected be spent, who was able to speak God’s words of promise and healing, where was Jesus going, should they follow or should they go home and call it a day?

Even when they had agreed to go out and tell the story of Jesus—his life, his ministry, his death, and, yes, his resurrection, they couldn’t agree on how that story should be told. As a witness to this conflict, we have this Gospel book of John to help us understand it.

The book of John is not just a story about Jesus. It is an historic merging of at least two faith communities coming together probably in the area in and around Ephesus. We know this because the Gospel of John was presented to the church by the Bishop of Ephesus whose name was Polycarp. Thus, this prayer for unity, for oneness, is even more important for the people of John’s community in the early years after the crucifixion and resurrection. In this single Gospel, we have one group of followers who think that Jesus’ teaching and philosophy on life needs to be the central focus of who Jesus is. The other group thinks that telling the stories of the miracles Jesus performed should be the center of who this Jesus is.

Neither group seems to have been strong enough to make it on its own, so at least these two faith communities got together to tell a unified story. The result is the Gospel of John that tells one complete story including the philosophy of Jesus with his teaching and six miracles or sign stories. They agreed on almost everything except how to end their telling of who this Jesus is and what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

At the end of the telling of who Jesus is, they had two separate endings, one in Chapter 20 and the second ending in Chapter 21. What to do? Not knowing which of the endings to use, they included both. After all, Genesis has two creation stories. Why shouldn’t the end of Jesus’ story have two endings? So, in part, this Gospel of John is an answer to Jesus’ prayer. “Father, I pray that they may be one, as you, O Father, and I are one.”

And in this year of the 500^th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation, we hear these words in our background, “That they become one.” We note that the Pope is attending many of the Reformation celebrations. We are closer to being reunited with our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters than we have been in…well, 500 years. This is an amazing time. May we someday know the oneness that Jesus prayed for those many years ago.

Later in this prayer we will hear that Jesus wants us to be one with him in faith and to know the oneness he shares with the father, but, at this point of the prayer, he is praying for us to know oneness with one another and the world around us. Think about this. Jesus wants us to be one with all of God’s people and yet we continue to find new ways to build walls that separate us. We find ways to push others out of our way in order to say, “Wait a minute! It’s all about me! It’s all about what I believe! It’s about my way of doing things!”

For the record, I believe that Jesus is still praying that we learn to be one and that through sharing our stories, through sharing our lives, through sharing our commitment to build up one another and to defend our neighbors, through sharing our sufferings and our joys, we might come to know the wholeness, the oneness of Christ, and to experience the life that comes from Christ which is God’s mercy, grace, truth, and forgiveness.

Again, for the record, as we live into the days ahead, let us look for those places where we are one with our neighbors, to be aware of being an answer to Christ’s prayer, and may we be instruments of God’s plan, creating unity in our divided world—that oneness that comes in knowing the Father and his son Jesus Christ.