Easter 7A, 21 May 2023. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

• Acts 1:6-14. All of these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women.
• 1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11 [but what about 4:16?]. If any of you suffers as a Christian, do not consider it a disgrace, but glorify God because you bear this name.
• John 17:1-11. Protect them in your name that you have given me…so that they may be one as we are one.

O God our protector, may we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth – come when it may and cost what it will.

Today in our Church calendar we mark the time between the Feast of the Ascension and the Feast of Pentecost. It’s a liturgical acknowledgement of a sort of limbo, in which Jesus has triumphed over death and but has yet to go to his heavenly reward; the comfort and the inspiration, the clarifying flame of the Holy Spirit, which he had promised to send, has not yet arrived. It’s a little bit like the in-between time at Emmanuel between the end of our cantata season and the beginning of chapel camp.

Many of you know that I almost always have a complaint about the lessons as they are given to us in the lectionary, and today is no exception. In my opinion the passage from 1 Peter skips right over some really important verses. And the passage from the Gospel of John, giving us half a prayer, stops right in the middle of an idea. In 1 Peter, this line is left out: “If any of you suffers as a Christian, do not consider it a disgrace, but glorify God because you bear this name.” That seems pretty important to me, and it can be a key to understanding the reading from John that it is paired with on this seventh Sunday of Easter. I’ll read the skipped verse again: “If any of you suffers as a Christian, do not consider it a disgrace, but glorify God because you bear this name;” that is, the name Christian.  Christian was a derogatory label when it was first applied; it was a bad word. Both the writer of 1 Peter and John the Evangelist know from experience that if you’re doing your job following Jesus, you are going to suffer, because suffering is a consequence of compassion and the struggle for right-relationship. It’s a consequence of living in a community of accountability; because when any one suffers, the whole body suffers.

The context for the passage in John’s narrative is that this is the last thing Jesus was saying to his closest circle of friends before he was arrested. It’s interesting to place this reading in Eastertide, to recall what Jesus told his dearest friends before he was captured and crucified, in a season when it seems as if the Risen Lord has disappeared. Perhaps, like the Galileans, we’re left staring into space wondering when, and how on earth, God’s realm will ever be restored. We’re given the beginning of Jesus’ prayer for himself, his followers, and the church universal. I won’t read the part of it that got cut off, but it includes his prayer that they be made holy in truth and that his love, and the love of God, would be in them. I want to say something about the verb glorify, because it’s not a word we use much in our vernacular. The Greek word for glory, doxazo, means to cause dignity and worth to become recognizable.

When you read his whole prayer, you may wonder about Jesus praying for the church universal before he was even handed over to be executed; and you should. This was written in and for the early church at least three generations after his death; and the author was imagining what Jesus would have been praying if he had known, imagining that Jesus did in fact know that his followers would be harassed and scattered.  Jesus, assuming the posture of prayer, praying to God, in effect says, “I caused your dignity and worth to become recognizable by finishing the work you gave me to do, so please cause my dignity and worth to become recognizable with your own presence, with the dignity and worth I had in your presence before the world began.”  Jesus is praying for the protection of his followers, that they might have eternal life. “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, God our Maker…and know Jesus Christ.” This is eternal life: intimacy with the Holy One and with Jesus the Christ. Can eternal life get any simpler (or any more difficult) than that?

This is Jesus, praying that God will protect them so that they may be one (which indicates, by the way, that they were not experiencing oneness). There were already divisions among them in the earliest Christian church. It’s always worth remembering that if something is being asked for or commanded in scripture, it’s because it’s not happening. This is Jesus, praying that they may have his joy made complete in themselves (which means that they’re not feeling particularly complete in their joy). This is Jesus, praying that they may be saved from the power of evil to destroy. Does this ring a bell in you? Do you notice divisions in the church? Do you experience the incomplete joy in ourselves as Christians? Do you feel the power of evil in our lives, which keeps us afraid and apart rather than together in love? This prayer, which John has placed in the mouth of Jesus, is as necessary today as it was around the turn of the first century of the Common Era. 

The part of Jesus’ prayer for God’s protection is interesting to me because the Greek word that here gets translated protect, is usually translated keep, both as in keeping or guarding commandments, but also as in guarding, keeping in close custody as to prevent running away!  Jesus is saying:

Dear God, watch them closely so they don’t run away! I’ve brought them this far, but they’re going to want to run away from the utter shame, the scandal of the cross. They’re going to want to run away from the suffering they will endure if they challenge the power of fear and hatred with my message of redeeming love and your preferential option for those who are oppressed. Please God, don’t let them run away.

This prayer of Jesus is not theoretical or hypothetical. The lives and loves of Jesus’ followers were at stake, and still are.

Perhaps you know the story about a man with a hunched back, who was a great rabbinic scholar from a Hasidic family. He was to be married to a beautiful woman, but when she took one look at him, she was so shocked by his deformity that she refused to marry him. She wanted to run away. When he heard the news, he told the families, “I’ll be happy to cancel the marriage even though we’ve arranged it, but I just want five minutes to talk with her.” So they gave the couple five minutes alone. When the two of them came out of the room, the families were astonished because suddenly the woman was happy to marry him, delighted even. So a student said to him, “Rebbe, what did you say in five minutes that turned her around?” He replied: “Very simple. I made her see that the moment in which, forty days before we were both conceived, there was a heavenly announcement, which said, ‘This man is to marry that woman.’ At the same time there was an equally powerful announcement, which said, ‘But one of them is to have a hunched back.’ And she heard my soul say, ‘Oh, my God, if one of us is to have a hunched back, I can’t let it be her. Let it be me.’ So I was born with the hunched back. When she understood the way it happened, she said she would marry me.”

Rabbi Tsvi Blanchard, who writes about this folk tale, asks, “How many scars do you have from protecting and caring for other people?” [1] The scars from the hurt take on a very different view if the story tells you that they’re evidence of expressions of love, if the story is that forty days before you were created you were matched with this person, this cause, or this movement for right-relationship, and you had said, “If there’s to be a scar here, let it be me.” That is a completely different story.

Our Gospel story is that Jesus said, if there are to be scars here, let it be me. It’s clear in John’s Gospel that victory over death does not include magically erasing the scars. Our story is that the resurrected Jesus appeared to the disciples with open wounds in his hands and feet and in his side. Our story is that the Risen Lord said, “Look at my hands and my feet. Look at the marks where the nails have been.” Our Christian Testament story is that Jesus’ followers then took up Jesus’ work and said, “If there are to be scars, let it be me.” Our story, our tradition, tells us that this was an expression of love, and that the moment when we say, “Let it be me”, is our baptism. In our baptisms we are declared to be whole-heartedly in, in for the struggle in the community of the Church, because the essential message of the gospels is not principally about growth in personal piety or individual salvation. “The vision of the [realm] of God is grounded in a social program,” as Michael Johnston says in his volume of the New Church Teaching Series called Engaging the Word [2].

And it is hard work to not run away. It’s hard work to stay engaged and give each other some room, to cut one another some slack, to offer grace. It hurts to engage in the social program, and it will cause scars because proclaiming the love of God with our lives is always countercultural and dangerous. We must be willing to say to each other, “If there’s to be a scar here, let it be me.” This is knowing God and knowing Jesus Christ. This is, by Gospel definition, eternal life.

1.  Tsvi Blanchard, “The Healing Power of Jewish Stories” in Best Contemporary Jewish Writing (San Francisco:  Jossey-Bass, 2001) pp. 371-374.
2. Michael Johnston, Engaging the Word (Boston:  Cowley Publications, 2001), p. 156.