If you truly are made holy to love and live as Christ, you will be a threat to the world, like Jesus was; but you will also be a part of God’s healing of all things.
Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Seventh Sunday of Easter, year B
Text: John 17:6-19
Beloved in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
God came to us as a human and was unrecognizable.
Jesus is God’s creating Word in our human body, and we didn’t recognize or want him. John says, “The Word was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. The Word came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” (1:10-11)
And in this prayer on the night of his betrayal we heard today, Jesus names that. “I don’t belong to this world,” he says. And since God’s Word in our flesh was so unrecognizable to us, so problematic, so challenging, we had to get rid of him.
But the real problem is that in this prayer, Jesus trusts the same is true of us.
In this beautiful mystery of a conversation within the life of the Trinity, Jesus the Son says we also don’t belong to the world because we are Christ. We are shaped into God’s life and live as Christ’s love in the world. So the world won’t recognize or accept us either, Jesus assumes. That’s why Jesus asks that we be protected in this alien world.
I just wonder if Jesus is right about us.
Are we actually unrecognizable to the world?
Jesus absolutely was. His teaching, radical interpretation of Scripture, insistent boundary-breaking for the sake of God’s love, his welcome and inclusion of all, especially those on the margins, was so offensive to the authorities he had to be taken out.
But is there anything about our lives, about how we live in our neighborhood, or at work, or in relationships, that looks so much like Christ people just don’t know what to do with us? Does your love of God and love of neighbor so change you that people can’t relate, or are bothered or annoyed, or even angry at you? Does my life in Christ mean any risk for me at all?
We spend so much energy and attention on what others think of us, as if it would be horrifying if our life in Christ marked us as different, as if we fear that.
So the first question is, do we even want to be different like Christ?
It should be obvious, shouldn’t it? This community cares deeply about this world and the pain and suffering in it. We often wonder how we could help with any number of problems, from our racist systems to a societal structure that reinforces poverty and homelessness and inequality to our desperate helplessness in the face of war around the world.
Jesus says you and I can make a difference in our own places. That the more we look like Christ, love like Christ, the more we find the path Jesus first walked, we can heal what is wrong with our world.
And it sounds good until you have to make a stand. Or I have to talk to someone who disagrees with me. Or you have to reach out to your legislator. Or I need to actually love a neighbor I don’t even like. Or you have to recognize your own latent racism or sexism or classism, and actually try to change it, break it down. Or we have to make decisions that risk our wealth and security.
The cost of being Christ, the cost of loving, the cost of kindness, the cost of sacrificing some of our well-being, the cost of being seen by others as strange or naïve or just wrong, it’s a high cost.
But there’s good news. You have Christ’s grace in the Spirit to be changed, if you want it.
The Son speaks within God’s life and says, “I’m sending them out into the world, just as I was sent.” And Jesus adds, “so make them holy in the truth, in your Word.”
Remember, Jesus is the Word-made-flesh. And Jesus said, “I am the truth – it’s not abstract, truth is alive in my very being.” And, for Jesus, being holy is always love of God and love of neighbor. So here Christ says, “we’ll make that happen in you. You will become me. You won’t hold the truth as a weapon or fight over it, but you’ll embody it, live the truth of God’s love for all.”
If we want it, God will do it.
And when that starts to happen in you and me, the other part of this prayer helps deal with the cost.
Because when it starts to happen, you and I are going to start standing out in the world, looking different. We’re going to become more like Jesus and less recognizable as people who belong to this world. We’ll rub people the wrong way. We’ll risk our security and our ease of living. We’ll learn the feeling of going against the stream, we’ll increasingly realize we need to do something different, make new choices, live another way.
And when that happens, it will be hard. It will cost. But the joy is that Jesus asks here that you are always cared for in God’s arms. No matter what happens, even death, you don’t have to be afraid of becoming Christ, because God is with you.
And when it happens, when you and I become Christ as we were called to be in Baptism, we’ll become a real problem for this world. Like Jesus. And that’s the Triune God’s hope for the healing of all things.
In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
