The Gospel for Thursday, February 26, 2004
John 17:1-8
After saying this, Jesus raised his eyes to heaven and said: Father, the hour has come: glorify your Son so that your Son may glorify you; so that, just as you have given him power over all humanity, he may give eternal life to all those you have entrusted to him. And eternal life is this: to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I have glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. Now, Father, glorify me with that glory I had with you before ever the world existed. I have revealed your name to those whom you took from the world to give me. They were yours and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now at last they have recognised that all you have given me comes from you for I have given them the teaching you gave to me, and they have indeed accepted it and know for certain that I came from you, and have believed that it was you who sent me. -- The New Jerusalem Bible. 1995, c1985. Doubleday: Garden City, N.Y.
A Study
John once again makes the unity of Jesus and his Father vividly transparent to us all. Unlike the synoptics, where he sweats blood in the Garden, here he philosophically -- and lovingly -- recommends to his Father his apostles who have learned Jesus' truth.
Eternal life is defined here: to know God and Jesus. There is a timelessness, completeness, and comprehensiveness in John's use of the word "know" that escapes translation, or that cannot be translated. Perhaps another might have translated "to be assimilated into God and Jesus."
Again and again, John returns to the themes he established in his opening paragraphs: "But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God...." Perhaps that yields some small sliver of increased understanding of Jesus' use of "know:" that we are to become from God, with God's DNA, in a closeness we cannot imagine.
A Reflection
A friend wrote to me the other day that something I had written had caused her to recollect times when she had been praying with or for someone else -- intensely -- and, upon finishing the prayer realized that she had lost all consciousness of self for a brief period. I believe that she experienced what Eckhart Tolle calls the space in which God exists. It is the space that is always there, except that we fill it with wants and worries about things. When we step back from it -- which is both trivially simple and incredibly difficult at the same time -- we briefly glimpse the place where God lives.
The Adam & Eve story, central to the creation/evolution debate, forms nevertheless a corner of the foundation of our theology. Two crucial parts of it are that we are creatures of a loving God and that he instructed us to be fruitful and to occupy the earth and to use the earth and its resources for ourselves [and he didn't say use it all up!].
At the other end of the foundation is another corner of our theology. Jesus beckons us always to sell all we have, give it to the poor, and follow Him. The ascetic life of complete followership would preclude multiplying or subjugating.
And so we are caught in the tension of the theology that we ourselves have created in trying to explain how things work. As much as we would like to say that we are Christians, not Jews, we live our lives in the Jewish compromise, trying to be righteous without being a Nazirite! We do not live our lives as complete disciples of Jesus.
If we all took neither sandals nor purse nor staff, and journeyed to the next village, who would be there to welcome us?
God has created us into a tension between the desire to follow the Holy and the need to be fruitful and subjugate. When we recognize truths like this, we feel the need to "press ourselves into God," as Os Hilman says. That is why knowing that Jesus has paid the price for us is so critical to our continued sanity.
6:53:17 AM 
|
|
