NewCreation

Homily for Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year C

The Homily for the 7th week of Easter. Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this, the homily for the 7th week of Easter. Some of you are in liturgical areas where the bishops have decided that you have Ascension today rather than last Thursday, and so you may want to look for the homily concerning the Ascension. But for those who celebrated the Ascension on Thursday, this is, as it were, the last Sunday of Easter before we get Pentecost next Sunday. Traditionally, there being ten days between the Ascension and Pentecost, it was understood that the Ascension was on the 40th day, and Pentecost is the 50th day. So that's how the mathematics of it works. Now, in this seventh Sunday of Easter, we're given our last chunk of John to help us, as it were, sit into, lean into the coming of the Holy Spirit, which is going to come upon us soon, as part of what our living the risen life of the Lord is. And this Sunday we get the last part of Jesus's last talk with his disciples. Immediately after today's Gospel, the account of the Passion begins. It's immediately after this that he goes out with his disciples to the Kidron Valley, and from then on it's all action. So this is his last big set piece speech, and as many commentators have noticed throughout the years, it is referred to as Jesus's high priestly speech. And this is not simply a piece of Christian, as it were, poetic license: it follows quite strictly the form of prayer proper to the high priest at the feast of the Atonement, both as that is set out in the book of Leviticus, and as — more contemporary to Jesus — we know it from the Mishnah Yoma, which describes how this works. This works such that at the beginning the priest prays for himself, then he prays for his immediate household of priests, and finally he prays for the people, the rest of the public. And here Jesus begins: in chapter 17, verses 1 to 6, he looks up to heaven and then prays that the Father may glorify the Son, give the Son the reputation that the Son had with the Father before the foundation of the world. We'll come to that phrase in a second. That goes on for a number of verses. Then from verse 6 onwards, he turns to his disciples, and then from verse 20, he turns to us — those who will have received faith through the word of the disciples, the successors to the disciples — in other words, the rest of the people. And towards the end of that passage he says: "Father, I desire that those also whom you have given me may be with me where I am, to see my "glory which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world." So that comes towards the very end of today's speech. So at the beginning we have a reference to "before the foundation of the world," and at the end "before the foundation of the world." Why is that important? Because that brings out that this is a high priestly prayer. The understanding in the Rite of Atonement was that on the Day of Atonement the high priest alone would go into the holy place – what we call the Holy of Holies – entirely by himself, taking with him the blood of the lamb, which would then be sprinkled on the various artefacts in the Holy Place at the time in the first temple when there were artefacts, but then just on the walls in the second temple period, before he came out to actually perform the Thanksgiving sacrifice with the pieces of the lamb, the portions of the lamb that had been chosen to stand in for Yahweh. Because the original understanding was that in the atonement the high priest stood in for Yahweh. Yahweh became interpenetrated, became one with the high priest just for that occasion, and so that the high priest didn't actually kill himself, the lamb stood in for the high priest. So the understanding is that the lamb stood in for the high priest who was standing in for Yahweh, which is why the lamb was called the lamb for Yahweh, as opposed to the other sinless lamb, the one that was driven out, which was the one that stood in for Azazel, for the prince of the demons. So the key thing is that all this took place within the Holy of Holies, and one of the ways that people referred to the Holy of Holies – which was considered to be a microcosm of everything from before creation, everything before the foundation of the world – one of the ways that people referred to that place was "before the foundation of the world." In other words, it was understood that if you were in the Holy of Holies, you were doing something outside and before material existence. That was what the holy place symbolized. It stood in for the reality, the understanding that the whole of creation already happened, the whole of atonement already happened before anything was brought into being, and that the holy place was the place where the high priest communed with that reality. So here in John's Gospel we have Jesus communing with that reality himself, first of all praying about how he is going to receive the reputation, the glory, that he had with his Father Before the foundation of the world, the glory, the reputation, which is going to be shown in him. Sanctifying himself doesn't mean he needs to make himself holy; he's going to manifest the holiness which he has through giving himself up to death. That's the manifesting. That sanctifying himself doesn't mean "I'm going to engage in a number of strange little things just so as to make me" — I don't know — it's a manifesting. God manifests God's holiness at various times. So, immediately before our Gospel this week, Jesus says, "And for their sakes" — referring to his disciples — "I manifest my holiness, so that they also may be sanctified in truth." In other words, the way of the cross that I'm about to engage in will be how I manifest my holiness. And I'm doing this so that they can themselves walk in truth, by learning to see the mechanism that leads to people being crucified, and occupy it peacefully, not being run by fear of death or fear of accusation, but being sanctified in truth, occupying that space and being able to transmit it to others. So then, having asked that for his disciples, he then asks it for the rest of us: "I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word." We who two thousand years later have heard the Gospel through parents, through teachers, through friends, through reading certain books, through certain preaching — who knows how the word reached you, how it was brought to your attention that the Word is beyond death, that there is something greater than the whole of human culture run by death that has been spoken into our midst by God. Who knows how that act of communication reached you? Just think of the strange way it reached me. But this is the act of communication from God, which we call God's Word, which is living, dynamic, which is born of the Holy Spirit, and which is part of what Jesus was giving his disciples. "On behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one." And here we have one of the things that Jesus is repeating from the atonement — right, at-one-ment — which is the time when everything becomes one. The prophet Zechariah even says, on that day God will be one. There is a sense of creation as a dispersed reality that hasn't yet achieved oneness, and that the power of the creator tends to making things one. And that can be quite a frightening thing for us, because "one" can be a way of making everybody fit into the same little hut. It can be a reductive thing. But it's quite obvious that Jesus' understanding of the way in which God makes things one is an ever greater — it's one in the non-mathematical sense — is with so much diversity that harmoniously works together, that we are able to rejoice in being brought into it: that the Father is in Jesus, the Spirit which is to be given is in both of them, and is shared with us, so that we find ourselves actually coming alive in them. It's being inhabited by something. It imagines us as malleable, not as individuals with individual spirits, but as malleable inter-divideals, as my Guru Ganesha would say — inter-divideals who are able to be possessed by evil desires and spirits coming from others, but also able to be inhabited, indwelt by the Spirit, which is making us, with all our distractions and separations and envies and rivalries, turning us into one. "As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us." So part of the prayer of the atonement rite was the high priest expected to be at one with the Most High by becoming an emanation, if you like, of Yahweh, the second person, the Son. This is what Jesus is doing. He's enacting that in real time, not in a building — a Temple — but in what will become the future of the Temple; in other words, our midst. "As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me." In other words, our finding ourselves at one with each other, thanks to Jesus's word, is really the only thing that could possibly show the world that God's message is true. Witness is all. We are being turned into witnesses — people who are, without even necessarily being aware of it, giving off, showing the true reputation of God, who God really is: the one who gives themselves away in the midst of our violence, our fear, unworried, peaceful, loving. "The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one as we are one." So he's saying the reputation that enabled Jesus — his understanding of himself — enabled him to come to this place, as to give himself away; that is what he's going to give to us. "I in them and you in me, so that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me." In other words, the whole of this is to produce people who are able to bear witness to love. That's how we know that it is of God. Titles, authority — none of those things are at the beginning of a hint of as much importance as this. Are we in any sense at all delicious symptoms of God's love? Or are we people who think that the love is only for me and not something that I receive from others and am able to share with others? "Father, I desire that those also whom you have given me may be with me where I am, to see my glory." In other words, from generation to generation, we are in this same place — this upper room, which is also the Holy of Holies, with the Holy One who is giving himself so that we can learn always to detect where he is. It's going to look different. Our imitation of it is going to be flexible from generation to generation, but this is the witness. that we're going to bear. "That they may be with me where I am, to see my glory which you have given me, because you loved me before the foundation of the world." In other words, this plan precedes everything. This is not a reactive plan. This project of opening up creation through including us and bringing us into the possibility of discovering what is true, how things really are, what the way that the whole pattern of creation really works is, being on the inside of that — that was what he wanted from the word go. "Righteous Father, Just Father, the world does not know you." It couldn't. Our ordinary forms of learning concerning what is powerful are completely, completely distorted by our own living of power. "But I know you, and these know that you have sent me." In other words, they have picked up that there is something about what Jesus is doing that suggests that he is a genuine act of communication from God. "I made your name known to them" — I made who you really are available to them. "And I am going to make it known." In other words, being on the cross, that will be the maximum sign of who God really is. There is no other image of God than Jesus on the cross. "…so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them." This is the last phrase of Jesus' public address to his disciples. The whole purpose of this was to enter into that place, so as to reveal what the heart of the creator of all things is, in such a way that we might be contaminated by it, contacted by it, that it may be contagious among us, so that we too can start to bear witness to what really is. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.