The Gospel lesson for last week is found in the 15th chapter of the Gospel According to John. This is in the midst of that portion of John’s Gospel where Jesus is instructing his disciples on what they’re supposed to do, particularly after He is no longer with them.
At the opening of the 17th chapter, Jesus begins what is know as the High Priestly Prayer where Jesus prays for those who had followed him for at least a portion of his 3-year ministry. It is from this prayer to His Father that today’s Gospel lesson is taken. The prayer concludes at the end of the chapter. Jesus is arrested early in the 18th chapter.
There’s much fodder for sermons in John 17:6-19, but I want to concentrate on the idea that even though the disciples were in the world, they didn’t belong to the world. In verses 14 and 15, Jesus prays, “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. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one.”
Back in chapter 15 when Jesus was teaching his followers, John has Jesus telling them at verse 19, “If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own. Because you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world – therefore the world hates you.”
At this point, it may be necessary to digress into a little history. When reading this portion of John’s Gospel, it’s very easy to slip into the heresy we call Gnosticism, which held, among a lot of other things, that all matter, including the world and the body, were evil. Gnosticism was one of the first, if not the first, heresy the early church faced. The early fathers declared that God didn’t create anything evil.
As Bonnell Spencer wrote in his book Ye Are The Body, “Evil for the Christian does not spring from matter but from human sin. Sin is the deliberate misuse of God’s gifts, including the body and the material world, for the individual’s selfish pleasure, instead of using them as the means of serving and glorifying God.”
St. Paul spoke out against Gnosticism in some of his letters.
With that out of the way, I hope it’s clear to everyone that “God don’t make no junk,” as someone said a long time ago while we were discussing early heresies.
I firmly believe the instructions given in chapters 15 and 16 of John’s Gospel are as applicable to us today as they were to the first disciples. Likewise, I feel Jesus was praying for all His disciples, even those not yet born.
Ok, so if we’re in the world, but not of the world, what are we “of?” I’m going to go out on a limb here and say we’re of the Kingdom of God. After all, Jesus did say the Kingdom of God is at hand. What does or will this kingdom look like?
We’ve all read descriptions of someone’s idea what the New Jerusalem will look like. Gold-lined streets. Heaven on earth. The descriptions go on and on.
The Kingdom of God is a work in progress in my way of thinking. It’s still yet to be fully established. When completed, what will it look like? Quite frankly I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone else knows either. What we read and hear about the fulfillment of the kingdom is nothing more than speculation and/or wishful thinking on the parts of others.
The First Letter of John gives us a hint as to what citizenship in the Kingdom of God entails. “If we receive human testimony, the testimony of God is greater; for this is the testimony of God that he has testified to his Son. Those who believe in the Son of God have the testimony in their hearts. Those who do not believe in God have made him a liar by not believing in the testimony that God has given concerning his Son. And this is the testimony: God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.”
Part of citizenship in the kingdom is eternal life.
The Collect for today says that Jesus is now in God’s Kingdom in heaven. That begs the question, “Is the Kingdom in heaven totally different and separate from what will be the Kingdom on earth once it’s completed?”Some have prophesied that the kingdom will arrive following a 1,000-year war between good and evil. I wish I had the answer. I just don’t know.
But what I do know is this. We are not to sit around twiddling our thumbs while waiting for the Kingdom of God to be completed. We are called to be instruments of change in the world in which we find ourselves. And that instrumentation is supposed to be based on love. Not the sentimental, romantic love of novels and movies, either. But rather that love of and for God and all his creation that makes us see and do things differently as we follow where Christ leads us. We have to transform ourselves from within before we can have the ability to change the world around us.
The following quote from Richard Rohr comes via George Miksch.
“Jesus was a wisdom teacher, a person who…clearly emerges out of and works within an ancient tradition called ‘wisdom….’ It’s concerned with the transformation of the whole human being. Transformation from what to what? Well, for a starter, from our animal instincts and egocentricity into love and compassion, from a judgmental and dualistic worldview into a nondual acceptingness. This was the message that Jesus, apparently out of nowhere, came preaching and teaching, a message that was radical in its own time and remains equally radical today….
“From my wider immersion in the worldwide wisdom tradition, I’ve been reaffirmed in my sense that Jesus came first and foremost as a teacher of the path of inner transformation. That doesn’t take away the Jesus you may be more familiar with – the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity – but it does add a renewed emphasis on paying attention to what he actually taught and seeing how we can begin to walk it authentically from the inside. It also suggests that he did not really come out of nowhere, but rather that he belongs to a stream of living wisdom that has been flowing through the human condition for at least 5,000 years.”
According to Wikipedia, “TheTalmudis the central text ofRabbinic Judaismand the primary source ofJewish religious lawand theology.” The Talmud is supposed to be studied, not simply read.
This is supposedly from the Talmud. “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the World’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”
In other words, the time for sitting around in our easy chairs and doing nothing whilewaiting is over. It’s time to walk the walk.
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