The Seventh Sunday of Easter
Sermon
The Seventh Sunday of Easter
12 May 2024
The Reverend Dr James Gardom
Acts 1.15–17, 21–26; John 17.6–19
On Thursday we celebrated the Ascension of Christ into heaven, which brought to an end the 40 days of his physical presence with the disciples after the Resurrection. This coming Sunday we shall celebrate Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit to the disciples – God’s presence in a new way. Today we are in the in between time, with Christ gone, and the Holy Spirit not yet arrived. This is reflected in the phrases from our Collect: we beseech you, leave us not comfortless, but send your Holy Spirit to strengthen us.
To help us make sense of this, our gospel reading, as for all the Sundays after Easter, is taken from the long section of John’s Gospel, known as the High Priestly Prayer. For three chapters we have an extended Theological meditation on what it means for Christ to be absent from us physically, and present to us through the Holy Spirit.
I want to pick out three things.
Oneness in Christ.
“Oneness” is a really central idea in John’s gospel. Sometimes it is expressed in terms of “abiding” and sometimes in terms of love. The connection between Jesus and the Father is as close as imaginable. Mutual indwelling. In the High Priestly Prayer, Jesus is telling his disciples that they are now caught up, bound in with that Oneness. They abide in it. They are Friends rather than Servants. As Christ goes to heaven, so, in a new way, the love of the disciples, which is bound up with the love of the Father and the Son, is stretched to heaven.
Oneness in love for Each Other.
This abiding and dwelling in love is not just a feature of the relationship between Jesus and the Father, or between the individual disciple and Christ. It is a feature of the relationship between the disciples. John 13:35 “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another.” John 17:11 “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”
Complexity, rather than oneness with the World.
And all this brings an even greater complexity to our relationship with the World. Perhaps unsurprisingly this is one of the most complex ideas in John. Jesus is the light of the world. The world was made through him. He takes away the sin of the world. God so loved the world… That he sent his son… Not to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved. The world is judged by light. The bread of God gives life to the world. And in this passage, hatred. “I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.” As Jesus reflects on leaving his disciples in the world when he goes to Crucifixion, he makes it clear that this too is part of their experience, and their involvement in Christ’s self, and in his relationship with the Father.
It is hard not to feel a twinge of sympathy for the disciples as they await the dimly dreaded the next steps, the betrayal, the arrest, and listen to this prayer which sets out the new configuration, so different from the joy, the intimacy, the immediacy of the presence of Christ. I think we feel a twinge of sympathy partly because the new relationships Christ is outlining are our relationships.
At times, in prayer and sacrament we dimly feel our involvement in the love of God that passes between the Father and the Son. That is the experience around which we build our worship and our lives. We don’t come to church for the beauty of the architecture, the beauty of the music, or the beauty of the words. We come because, in some small way, we actually sense the love that passes between the Father and the Son, and we sense also our involvement in it. Would that it were stronger, and more fully discernible, but that is what we come for, and it brings us back again and again.
At times, and at best, in our fellowship with each other we dimly feel an echo of the oneness in love which Jesus describes. This is fragile, episodic, but it is most precious.
And always, of course, we feel the complexity of our relationship with the world. Do we, should we, love it or reject it. Is it God’s world or does it belong to the Ruler of this World. Is it condemned or saved.
This moment, this passage, and this new set of relationships are none of them easy, and that is because life actually is not terribly easy. We are stretched, longing, caught between heaven and earth, loving but not seeing Christ.
Two things make it bearable.
The first, which comes within our Gospel reading as the most unexpected word is “Joy”. “But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves.” With all this there are moments, and enough moments, when we sense the Joy of Christ in the love of God, and with it gain the strength to continue.
The second, which lies behind this reading and this season is the promise of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter/Helper/Advocate, whom we find to be as close to us as our own breath, and in whom these ideas and experiences become not tenuous hopes, but lived, experienced and powerful realities.
And so we wait for Pentecost.