Sermon - The Rev. Dr. Elise Feyerherm, May 21st, 2023

With its opening words, our gospel reading for this morning makes something of a shift from what comes before in what we call Jesus’ “Farewell Discourse” in the gospel of John. Up until this point, Jesus has been speaking to his disciples – comforting them, cajoling them, and coaching them about what is to come after he has returned to God the Father. But here, in chapter 17, Jesus stops talking to the disciples and begins speaking to God. The disciples, and we, are privileged to overhear one side of a conversation that is grounded in a love so powerful, it changes the world.

It is an intimate conversation, yet not private, because Jesus means for the disciples to eavesdrop. He wants them to listen and learn from this language of love. He means for them to overhear and in so doing experience something of what he and God the Father have together. Several chapters earlier, Thomas asks Jesus, “How can we know the way?” and Philip demands, “Show us the Father.” This prayer, sometimes called “The High Priestly Prayer” of Jesus, is the culmination of Jesus’ answer to that question, and that request. Not only in what Jesus prays, but also in how he prays, the disciples and we are invited into an experience of the living God. An experience, if you will, of eternal life.

There are some odd moments in the prayer, such as when Jesus starts to speak about himself in the third person. Jesus also seems to imply that his work on earth is finished, when we know that his crucifixion and resurrection are yet to come. But these are simply signs that what we are overhearing is essentially coming from the risen Jesus, a flash forward, if you will, to a reality that in time has not yet occurred, but in the eternity of God, has always been and always will be.

This prayer is calling us into an experience of God the ground and source of all that is, which Jesus is able to do because he has always been and always will be one with that God. This prayer is essentially an embodiment of Jesus’ words: “This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” With these words, Jesus invites us into the mystery that is God.

How many of us were taught at a young age, or simply intuited from the words and actions of people around us, that “eternal life” is a reward that we will receive after we die, if we believe and do the right things? How many of us picture this reward simply as time that passes in the same way that time passes here on earth, but goes on forever? As Paul said last Sunday, the only reference we have for the things of God is what we experience here on earth, in our limited, concrete world; it is no surprise that our imagining of eternal life is limited in the same way.

But what if we took Jesus at his word? What if we dove deep into this promise, that eternal life is knowing the true God and Jesus Christ whom God has sent? What might this show us about God and about what it means to live as Christians?

We cannot “know” God as God is in Godself. God is beyond time, beyond space, the Source of all that is but not contained in or bound by time and space. Anything we say about God is incomplete, a hint and a guess, touching on the truth but always falling short. And this is as it should be, because if we could capture God in perfect words, the God we captured would no longer be God.

So “knowing” God must be something other than having collected all the correct information about God, like having written the definitive biography of the Almighty. This high priestly prayer of Jesus, indeed, the whole of the gospel traditions, invites us into a different kind of knowing, a knowing that is the fruit of love, of mutual giving and receiving that defines reality itself and holds it together. For us gathered here, who have been given by God to Jesus, God is most fully known in Jesus. This prayer is the prayer of One who is so close to God that the only way to speak of it is in the dizzying language of mutual indwelling. We cannot know one without the other, because that is the only way God can show us the essence of love. Love is not love without the other, without the Beloved. It is the only way we can truly understand eternal life, by encountering and giving ourselves to this love.

Jesus embodied love in his human life, in his suffering, in his death, in his resurrection and ascension. But this prayer reminds us that this love did not begin with Jesus’ birth; it flows from an eternal glory that the Word – capital “W” – had in God’s presence before the world, and time, even existed. There is no time, nowhere that Love is not.

Love must express itself, must speak the reality of Love. Jesus prays, “I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world.” Every action, every word from Jesus’ lips, speaks the name of Love, and although we cannot always understand it fully, we may trust that somewhere in the word cloud is the thing we need to hear. Love asks not for its own benefit, but asks always on the other’s behalf; Jesus beseechs Love on behalf of those who have been given to him – on our behalf. 

Love also does not hoard, keeping its wealth to itself; the words “mine” and “yours” intertwine with gracious abandon. “All mine are yours,” Jesus prays, “and yours are mine.” Love seeks the protection of the beloved, the sustaining of the beloved’s deepest self, the flourishing of all that is good. “Holy Father,” Jesus prays, “protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.” 

So it turns out that we can know God, and we actually do, at least in the ways that matter. God has spoken a Word which has taken on flesh, and that Word has loved us into being, given birth to this Body of Love on earth. We know, because we have received it, that love cannot by its nature keep to itself; there was nothing that could keep God from joining us here on earth, because that is what Love does. 

What we grasp with our minds is nothing compared to what we receive at this table; the Body and Blood of Love Incarnate. Nothing could keep God from joining us, nothing could keep God from feeding us with Love itself, here in the bread and wine which is the Body and Blood of Christ. 

When we understand this, when we experience this, nothing else matters. Time is irrelevant; we know that the past, the present, and the future, are all redeemed and made holy. Each moment, even if it is a moment of pain or fear, is taken up into the Love that is God, and we see that we are never alone. This is, in the midst of everything, eternal life: to know God and Jesus Christ whom God has sent. In this circle of Love, everything is possible.

Let us pray:

Threefold One, relationship in unity, 

love given and received through all the ages long: 

give us that unity which is not enclosed 

but alive and accepting with the open heart of love; 

through Jesus Christ, the glory of God. Amen.