Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
The Seventh Sunday of Easter, 12^th of May, 2024

John 17:6-19

It is late in the evening. The meal is long over. Earlier, as the meal ended, Jesus knelt and washed his disciples’ feet. He then began to prepare them for life without him. He gave them the new commandment, that they love one another. He prepared them for the coming of the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, the Spirit of Truth. He shared with them the mutual indwelling of the Father and the Son. And he spoke of his betrayal and death. He gave them his final teachings, the wisdom that they would hold onto during the horrors of his crucifixion and the overwhelming joy and shock of his resurrection.

Now, in the passage we hear today, Jesus turns from the disciples to his Father. The disciples become involuntary eavesdroppers on a prayer of communion, on an intimate meeting between the Father and the Son. But because they are listening, this prayer of communion is also a prayer of revelation. Even now, as he speaks with his Father, Jesus is teaching his disciples more about who God is and about who they are. Through the Gospel according to John, we have been placed in the same position as Jesus’ first disciples, overhearing what he is saying to the Father, and we have things to learn from this prayer, too.

The first thing that Jesus’ prayer reveals is the complete unity of the Father and the Son. Jesus’ knowledge of the Father gives him an immediate experience of God; Jesus is face to face with the God to whom he prays. The will of the Father and the will of the Son are one, so Jesus’ prayer is more of relationship than request. Jesus can make petitions in complete confidence that they will be granted because what the Son asks, the Father wants to give. This is an unusual position for a petitioner to be in. Most of us, those of us who are not saints or mystics, see God in a mirror, dimly. We do not yet see God face to face. When we pray there is always an unspoken caveat: not my will, but yours, be done. We do not know the mind of God. But Jesus does.

Jesus is the one who has glorified the Father and will be glorified by him. Jesus has glorified God on earth by revealing him to the disciples. His completion of the task is shown by the small group that surrounds him as he prays, the disciples to whom he has made God’s name known. They now know God intimately. They know God by name: ‘I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world.’ And as I said last week and say so often that you must be tired of it, the nature of the God revealed in Jesus’ life, death, and teaching is love. In this Farewell Discourse Jesus has told his disciples that love is the new commandment, that they are to love one another as he loves them. In the crucifixion that will take place on the day after this meal, Jesus will make that love, God’s love, manifest, by laying down his life. Jesus has made God known by name, and that name is Love.

Jesus asks that his Father protect his disciples in the Father’s name. Jesus is leaving the world, and he is leaving his disciples in the world. They will need God’s protection. The author of this gospel uses ‘world’ in different ways. In John 3:16, the world is what Jesus came for: ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.’ But here the ‘world’ is not what Jesus came to save. ‘World’ does not mean the earth, this beautiful and fragile planet. And ‘world’ does not mean creation, which God called good. In this prayer the ‘world’ is the realm that does not acknowledge God. The ‘world’ is what is going to kill Jesus on the cross. This is the ‘world’ in which Jesus is leaving the disciples. It will hate the disciples, just as it hated Jesus, because by living out the commandment of love, by living in relationship with the Father and the Son, and by following Jesus’ example, the disciples will challenge the values and practices of the world. They will show that there is another way: a way of peace in a world of war, a way of love in a world of hate, a way of community in a world of competition. They will be troublemakers in the eyes of the world.

So far, Jesus has protected the disciples himself. Jesus ‘guarded them, and not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be fulfilled.’ Most people agree that the ‘one destined to be lost’ was Judas. Earlier in the evening, Jesus said, ‘Very truly, I tell you, one of you will betray me,’ dipped a piece of bread in a dish, and gave it to  ‘Judas son of Simon Iscariot.’ After Judas received the piece of bread, Satan entered him, and Judas immediately went out into the night. (John 13: 21-30) In today’s reading from the Book of Acts we see the Apostles replacing Judas with Matthias, and Peter describing Judas’ betrayal as foretold and necessary because ‘the scripture had to be fulfilled’. It would make sense for Jesus to be referring to Judas when he speaks of the one destined to be lost. But in Greek that phrase, ‘the one destined to be lost,’ is literally ‘the son of perdition’ and so one commentator I read this week, the Australian theologian Francis Moloney, argues that this is Satan. Jesus had, after all, washed Judas’ feet and shared food with him at the table before Satan entered him. The only one who is ever truly lost, Moloney writes, is ‘the evil one,’ the power of darkness, the being from whom Jesus asks the Father to protect the disciples. Not Judas.[1]

Julian of Norwich by Connie Wendleton https://fineartamerica.com/featured/julian-of-norwich-connie-wendleton.html

This brings me to Julian of Norwich, whose feast day is celebrated on the eighth of May. She had a problem. ‘Holy Church’ had taught her that the angels who fell by pride, and the heathens who died outside the faith, and any man who received Christianity and yet lived an unchristian life, ‘all these shall be condemned everlastingly to hell’.[2] And yet in her visions Julian did not see hell, nor did she see sin because ‘it has no sort of substance nor portion of being’.[3] She did not even see the Jews who did Jesus to death in her visions, ‘although I knew by my faith that they were cursed and damned for ever except for those who are converted through grace’.[4] Instead, Jesus told Julian, ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well’.[5] And when Julian asked how all things could be well if some people were condemned everlastingly to hell, she ‘received no other answer in showing from our Lord God but this: “What is impossible to you is not impossible to me. I shall keep my word in all things and I shall make all things well.”’[6] If all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well, then I am sure that Francis Moloney is right and not even Judas is lost.

Julian also has words of advice for us as we continue to live in the world, while not belonging to it. I have been struggling so much with the evil of the world over the past six months. It is always possible to find things in the world that seem to challenge any faith we might have in a good God, but there have been times over the past few months when I have had to turn off the television news because what is happening around the world and in Australia has so enraged me that I have felt physically sick. I do not believe in a personified devil, that there is a Satan who enters people as the gospel writers describe him entering Judas, yet there have been times over the past few months when I could believe that there is an Evil One walking the world. Then, when my anger fades, I feel guilty, because after all my children are not starving, my city is not being bombed, I do not have a violent partner of whom I need to be afraid. So, it has been a gift for me this week to turn back to Julian and the Revelations she received, and hear her say:

though we feel vengeful, quarrelsome and contentious, yet we are all mercifully enclosed in the kindness of God and in his gentleness, in his generosity and in his indulgence; for I saw quite certainly that our eternal support, our dwelling, our life and our being are all in God … God is our true peace, and he is our sure support when we are ourselves unpeaceful, and he is continually working to bring us into eternal peace.[7]

That was a paragraph that had not previously struck me, but another piece of advice she gave me this week was one that I have drawn on before:

[God’s] words, ‘You shall not be overcome,’ were said very loudly and clearly for security and comfort against all the tribulations that may come. He did not say, ‘You shall not be tormented, you shall not be troubled, you shall not be grieved,’ but he said, ‘You shall not be overcome.’[8]

What God, and Julian, mean by ‘you shall not be overcome’ is the same thing that the Apostle Paul wrote to the Romans. Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, not even death. (Romans 8.39)

Julian has one final piece of advice for those of us who find ourselves enraged at the world’s evil. She writes:

The soul that wants to be at peace must flee from thoughts of other people’s sins as though from the pains of hell, begging God for a remedy and for help against it; for the considerations of other people’s sins makes a sort of thick mist before the eyes of the soul, and during such times we cannot see the beauty of God unless we regard the sins with sorrow for those who commit them, with compassion and with a holy wish for God to help them; for if we do not do this the consideration of sins harms and distresses and hinders the soul; I understood this in the revelation of compassion.[9]

I can absolutely confirm that Julian is right, and that dwelling on other people’s sins ‘harms and distresses and hinders the soul.’

This is Jesus’ last night with his disciples in the world but, as the disciples overhear, he is not leaving them alone. Throughout the Farewell Discourse Jesus has talked about the Holy Spirit, who will come when he leaves, and next week we will celebrate the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost. And in this prayer, the disciples hear themselves commended to the Father by the Son. The incarnate Jesus may be leaving the world, but the Triune God will never leave them alone. In the words of Julian, ‘I saw that for us [God] is everything that we find good and comforting. He is our clothing, wrapping us for love, embracing and enclosing us for tender love, so that he can never leave us, being himself everything that is good for us.’[10]

On this Mother’s Day let us hold on to Julian’s revelation that God is our mother as truly as God is our father,[11] and remember that we are constantly surrounded by God’s motherly love, today and always. Amen.

[1] Francis J. Moloney, The Gospel of John, (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1998), pp. 467-8.

[2] Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (Penguin Classics, 1998), p. 86, chapter 32.

[3] Revelations, p, 79, chapter 27.

[4] Revelations, p. 87, chapter 33.

[5] Revelations, p. 79, chapter 27.

[6] Revelations, p. 86, chapter 32.

[7] Revelations, pp. 112-3, chapter 49.

[8] Revelations, p. 155, chapter 68.

[9] Revelations, p. 166, chapter 76.

[10] Revelations, p. 47, chapter 5.

[11] Revelations, p. 139, chapter 59.