Our Gospel reading today opens with Jesus praying what is known as the high priestly prayer in the hours before he will be arrested. Unlike other accounts which have Jesus praying alone while the disciples doze elsewhere, Jesus is in midst of his disciples here, and praying out loud. In the first half of the prayer, Jesus uses the word glorify a lot. He glorified the Father and now he’s asking the Father to glorify him so that we may know God.
We need to ask what Glorify means here. To me, glorify sounds like “raise up on high and add some back lighting so that the sunshine seems to be radiating out of the glorified person”, like something from a Monty Python sketch, but I am assured by better Biblical scholars than myself that Glorify here means to reveal the presence of God, which involves fewer crowns and sunbeams and more knowing God and being in relationship with God.
It is knowing God that gives us eternal life, and it’s not just something that will happen to us after our death, it is a thing that we’re supposed to be working for here and now, full relationship with God, which we can attain, or at least attempt, because we have a model of how to do it in Jesus Christ. Jesus came to Earth to be in relationship with God in a way that was visible to us, and now we reach the point in the story where he’s done that and it’s time for the next step.
In the second half of the prayer, Jesus lays out some pretty straightforward guidelines, at least as straightforward as the Gospel of John ever gets, for how we’re supposed to proceed if the goal is to try to be in relationship with God the way Jesus was. Jesus knew that the people he had with him were given to him by God. We should remember that the people we have with us are given to us by God. This is not the easiest thing to remember in day to day life when the people who were given to you by God are fighting with their brothers in the pews or cutting you off in traffic or neglecting their responsibilities as world leaders. It’s not just the people we like who were given to us by God. It’s all of them, even the ones who drive you slowly mad and make you turn off the evening news in despair. All of them belong to God and are gifts from God.
I’m going to say that again. Every one of our fellow human beings belong to God and are gifts from God.
Jesus prays for us to be protected by the Father so that we can all be one, just as the Father and the Son are one. I don’t think Jesus was under any illusion that this was going to be easy for us. Jesus, after all, had been with his disciples teaching them and modeling relationship with God to them for three years and still they didn’t really get it. They bickered among themselves about who was better, even though the poorest Biblical scholar could tell you that “I have a better relationship with God than you do.” is the least glorifying thing possible, as if in the fullness of God there isn’t room enough for all of us.
That’s part of what “eternal” means in eternal life. It’s not just about an afterlife. It's not about slogging through this life so that we can get to the prize at the end. This life is not the broccoli you have to eat before you can have a slice of cake. We can have life and have it abundantly, now, in a relationship with God.
Before I am accused of some kind of heresy, I want to be clear that I am not claiming that there isn’t an afterlife. I’m only claiming that we don’t have to wait for an afterlife to have eternal life. God, after all, does not exist in our time they way we do, so while we live our relationship with God moment by moment, our relationship with God exists both in the moment we’re living in right now, and also in all of the other moments we have ever and will ever live in both in this world and whatever lies beyond it.
In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis suggests that we think of our own lives as lines drawn on a page; we exist at one point on the line after another. God’s existence, meanwhile, is the page on which our own lives are drawn, existing simultaneously at every point on the line, and if I might be so bold as to expand on Lewis’ theory, the existence of God is not only touching our lives at every point on our line, but also the lives of everyone else who has ever lived, which means that through God we are connected to everyone else. They belong to God, just as we belong to God. They are God’s gifts to us, just as we are God’s gift to them. Eternal life and a relationship with God is not some individual achievement, a patch we can earn and sew on our vests. The relationship with God is all about being one with God and with each other to the best of our broken human abilities, here and now.
The last Sunday of Easter seems like a strange time for the lectionary to give us Jesus preparing for his arrest and eventual crucifixion. Why is Jesus praying about the hour of Glorification placed in our lectionary in the seventh week of Easter, long after we celebrate the resurrection? It’s because the hour of glorification Jesus refers to in the prayer isn’t just the crucifixion and resurrection. The hour of Glorification is the span of the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension which the church marks on Thursday, forty three days of Jesus showing us what love is, what the power of God is compared to the powers of man and death.
That takes us right into today’s reading from Acts, which begins with the apostles not getting it. To be sure, pretty much every story about the apostles is about them not getting it because they keep expecting whatever Jesus is going to do to be like what had been done before. So we drop into the first chapter of Acts and the apostles are asking “Is this the time when you will restore the Kingdom to Israel?” Is this the day when you will give us back the earthly glory of Solomon and David?
And Jesus’ answer is both a “Not Yet” and a “Not the way you’re thinking.” And then Jesus ascends into heaven, as if the disciples didn’t have a thousand more questions, most of them centered around “is this the time?” because he’s said everything he needs to say even though they still they don’t get it. We know they don’t get it because they stand around staring at the sky wondering is this the time? . . . How about now? . . . . Maybe now? Until two men in white robes, angels, appear and say What are you staring at the sky for? That’s not what you were told to do.”
The disciples, still not entirely sure what to do next, go back to the upper rooms. We know that the Holy Spirit will find them at Pentecost and give them the push they need to go do the things Jesus had been telling them to do all along, but they don't know that yet. They devoted themselves to prayer because they didn’t know the hour and they didn’t know what was coming for them. They pray because it’s the best response they have to what they don’t yet understand.
I know it sounds like I give the disciples a lot of grief about not getting it, but really, who can blame them? It’s complicated stuff, being one with God and being one with your neighbor, especially when you’ve been taught your whole life that the Messiah will be an earthly king who will restore an earthly kingdom, a theory which conveniently ignores the many troubles those earthly kings caused and still cause.
It’s easy to imagine, after you’ve been out of power for a while, that you’d do a much better job of it than the folks who are in charge now, whether it’s of the tiny church committee or of the whole country. It’s easy to imagine glorifying ourselves with that kind of earthly authority. But you can’t glorify yourself because you can’t be in relationship by yourself, or even just with the people who agree with you.
We belong to God and God has given us to each other so that we may be one with each other and one with God. And if, like the disciples, we don’t get it yet, it’s no surprise, because we live most of our lives in a world where that kind of relationship isn’t the norm. We know that relationship, oneness, eternal life, is the goal, but we also know that we trip up sometimes. We fail. When we do, when we run out of patience or strength or we're not sure what the next step is, we can do what the disciples did and turn to prayer while we wait for the spirit to descend on us, using the high priestly prayer from the Gospel as a template.
Jesus lived to glorify God. Are we, as a church, living to Glorify God, that is to be in full relationship with God?
Jesus knew that the people who followed him were given to him by God. Are we treating each other as gifts from God? Do we treat newcomers in the pews and students out on the sidewalk as gifts from God?
Do we remember that everything that we have comes from God, including our beautiful building? Do we use this building to glorify God, or do we treat it as personal property?
Do we use our resources as if they were God’s gifts, as if we believe that God will protect us, or do we hold them tight, letting anxiety dictate our decisions?
Do we live in the world so that world sees us, the congregation of St. Andrew’s and the larger church, as gifts from God to the world?
We don’t need to wait for a budget easing donation or a new rector or midterm elections or even Pentecost to do the work of being God’s gift to the world. Jesus’ answer to the Disciples’ question of “is this this the time?” is “Not Yet” but it’s also “Get started.” God is ready for us at this moment, at every moment, for us to belong to God and to each other.
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