Episcopal Church of the Incarnation
The Seventh Sunday in Easter (A)
Acts 1.6-14 Psalm 68.1-10, 33-36 1 Peter 4.12-14; 5.6-11 John 17.1-11
Alleluia. Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed.
Alleluia.
“Father,
the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you ...” The hour has
come. What hour? To answer this question let’s first go back
and look at the times in John’s Gospel when Jesus’ hour is described as not yet
come. Jesus first says that His hour is
not yet come to His mother, when she asks Him to help at the wedding feast in
It
is finished, the work which the Father has given the Son, and in preparing for
this final glory Jesus prays in our lesson today that the Father may glorify
the Son, as the Son glorifies the Father.
What work is it that the Father has given the Son? Nothing less than the salvation of Creation,
revealed in glory on the cross. Jesus
says that He has glorified the Father “by finishing the work that you gave me
to do,” and then–knowing that He is facing an agonizing death–asks that He may
be seen in the glory “... that I had in your presence before the world
existed.” In other words, the glory of
which Jesus speaks is one of selfless love, of giving, of the mutual delight
that each person shares within the Godhead.
The glory which the Son receives is that He does the Father’s work, and
in this He glorifies the Father by “[giving] eternal life to all whom you have
given [the Son]”. And what is this
glory? Eternal life, that those who are
saved “may know ... the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom [the Father has]
sent”.
Notice
here that our Lord refers to Himself, uniquely in the Gospel, by both His Name
and His title. “Jesus,” which means “God saves,” and “Christ,” which means the
Messiah, the “Anointed One”. He’s really
being very, very clear here. He is
telling no parable, but laying out the facts for all to see; but we still do
need to examine something else in what Jesus says, and that is what it means
for Him to be glorified.
To
give glory to someone is to give unreserved love and praise. It is to make him the center of your own
existence, the light by which you see and understand,
the light by which you understand creation.
So, for the Father to glorify the Son, and for the Son to glorify the
Father, tells us quite a lot about God.
Unlike any other faith, in Christian belief we relate to the God who
reveals Himself to us in relationship.
God, the Holy Trinity, is one God in three Persons. God is not some “world soul,” as we would
find in Buddhism, or a single almighty personal force, as we would find in
Islam and in parts of ancient Judaism.
The Jews recognized the Lord
to be a person, and spoke often of their relationship to Him, but in Jewish
belief God is not revealed in the relationships which exist within Himself, only in how He relates to the believer.
In
the Christian faith we believe in one God in three Persons. The Holy Trinity is never named in
scripture–indeed the word “trinity” does not appear before about the year
180–but the persons of the Godhead are named.
Jesus, the Son, is described both before all creation and in His earthly
ministry. The Father is referred to
constantly by Jesus, who instructs us to name God as Father in prayer. And the Holy Spirit is promised us by Jesus,
as advocate and counselor. Indeed, at the
end of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus instructs the disciples to take the Good News
into all lands, baptizing “in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28.19). And so, the
question becomes, what do we learn about God by knowing that He is one God in
three Persons?
The
first thing we learn is that God is relational.
Consider what Jesus says in our Gospel lesson today. He asks that the Father may glorify Him, just
as He has glorified the Father. In other
words, each person in the Godhead gives to each other unreserved love and
praise. Each person in the Trinity makes
each other person in the Trinity that pole around which He revolves in a
relationship of unrestricted self-giving.
When Jesus is facing a terrible death, what is it that He says to the
Father, “... not what I will, but what you will”.
There
is actually a technical term in theology for how each person of the Holy
Trinity is conceived of as being centered around each
other person. The term perichoresis,
which means literally “to dance around,” is a sort of Greek philosophical
equivalent of how we might today try to describe a quantum state both in terms
of particle and wave physics. We can’t
really explain the inner workings of God, but from what He reveals to us we can
learn that He glories in the will of each of His Persons, and that this
glorification is expressed in unreserved love.
We
often hear God described in terms of love.
In the First Letter of John we read:
Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of
God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for
God is love (1 Jn. 4.7-8).
God is love
indeed, but in order for there to be love there has to be someone to
love. The one absolute god described in
Islam, or the world soul described in Buddhism, is not described in terms of
love, for this one god has no other person with whom to share love. But when we say that “God is love” and speak
of the Holy Trinity, then we know that each Person of His very being and
essence is other-oriented; that the Father glories in the glorification of the
Son, the Son of the Father, each of the Spirit, and vice versa in all
possible combinations, in all possible dance steps of the perichoresis
by which and in which God expresses His love.
And what is the real wonder of this
all for us? It is that we get to
participate in this love! Knowing that
He will soon die an horrible death, Jesus prays to His
Father saying:
I have made your name known to those whom you gave
me from the world. They were yours, and
you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything you have given
me is from you ... I am asking ... on behalf of those whom you gave me, because
they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in
them. ... Holy Father, protect them in
your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.
As we are one. Jesus prays
that the eternal love which is shared between Father, Son and Holy Spirit may be
a love that we may participate in; that we may experience to share with others,
and in our lesson from Acts He promises that the Holy Spirit, the seal
of God’s love, will come upon the Church.
Jesus promises that we may
participate in the love which is the essence of God, and the only thing we have
to do in order to live in this love is accept it. When we glory in God, when we orient
ourselves selflessly to His will, His Spirit brings us into the “dance” of
God’s love, the dance in which we know eternal life. His Spirit leads us to focus not on ourselves
but on others, to do the work which God has given us to do, to be His witnesses
both in what we say and in how we act.
God is love. God is relationship,
and He calls us each to reach out to all others in love, that when we come to
know them and they come to know us we will each be led
to a greater knowledge and deeper experience of God Himself, of the God who
says of Himself and of us, “... I am coming to you ... Holy Father ...”
I am coming to you. These are words which promise salvation, which
promise that as we reach out to God He is reaching already for us; that He has
from our creation been reaching out to us to make us His, within His own being
which is defined by relationship, and that all we have to do is recognize that
the one great goal and good to strive for in all of life is God Himself, that we
may join in the “dance” of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, knowing that
each one of us who calls on Jesus as Lord shares in the very glory that the Lord God shares within Himself.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.