Seventh Sunday of Easter; 21 May 2023; Easter 7A (RCL); Acts 1:6-14; Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36; 1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11; John 17:1-11.
Easter 7 is the Sunday after the Feast of the Ascension, and we catch the theme of that feast in the reading from Acts. On Ascension Day itself, the Gospel reading for the celebration of the Eucharist comes from Luke’s Gospel, and narrates Jesus’ ascension into heaven, although he delays it by forty days in the Book of Acts (which is why it falls on Thursday in the sixth week of Easter — forty days after Easter). Luke’s narration of the ascension alludes to the apotheosis of Augustus, giving it a decidedly “political” flavor. (See “The Apotheosis of Washington” in the dome of the Capitol rotunda).
The reading from John’s Gospel for this Sunday is part of the Farewell Discourse, which John narrates, rather than narrating a “Last Supper.” In same ways, the prayer in Chapter 17 makes it seem like Jesus is no longer present (“I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world”). The prayer certainly refers back to the Prologue, when Jesus prays that God restore him to the glory he had in God’s presence before the world began.
Interestingly, Jesus prays only for his disciples (and those who will later believe) and not for the world. The cosmos, in John’s Gospel, is a contested space. It is the location of evil, the “outside” to the community’s inside, the dark to their light. But it is also what Jesus came to save — for God so loved the cosmos that he gave his only son . . . In chapter 20, Jesus will send his disciples into the world, just as the Father sent him into the world. And that sending will be for the sake of reconciling the world to God, giving them the power to forgive or retain sins.
We often hear this passage at services of prayer for Christian unity, because of the last line of this paragraph, “that they may be one, as we are one.” But I think this is a misreading of Jesus’ prayer. He’s not asking for unity among his followers, so much as he asking that God grant us the same kind of relationship to the Father that Jesus enjoyed. Again and again, in John’s Gospel, we hear of mutual indwelling between the Father, the Son, the Spirit, and the community of disciples (I am in you and you in me; I am in the Father and the Father in me; the Father and I will come and dwell in you; the Spirit will dwell in you).
The early Christians picked up on this idea of mutual coinherence (in Greek perichoresis) as the relationship between the Persons of the Trinity. John’s Gospel suggests that we share in that dynamic coinherence that is the life of the Trinity. So, while Jesus may pray that he is no longer in the world, when he adds, but they are in the world, the implication is that as long as we are in the world, Jesus is in the world through us, and through Jesus (and us) the Father is in the world, in the same way as when Jesus was in the world.
So, while “the world” may be the “outside” to our “inside” as the community of Jesus’ disciples, we are Jesus’ (and God’s) presence in the world for the world. For John, the Christian life my be the life of the new people on the wilderness way toward God, it is not a complete withdrawal from the world. After all, Jesus enters the room through the locked door and sends his disciples just as the Father sent him. We may want to lock ourselves in our little room, now that Jesus has left us, but he’s having none of it. He prays on our behalf, so that we can be on behalf of the world.