This past weekend was a preaching weekend for me at Christ Church Easton. The lectionary Gospel reading for the day was John 17:6-19, after Jesus has given his farewell discourse to his disciples, and he looks up to heaven and prays for them. I referenced a bit of John 17 before and after the lectionary verses.
“Protected and Connected”
This is the seventh and last Sunday of the Easter season. In our Easter lectionary this year, we have been heavy into John’s Gospel. We heard about the empty tomb and Mary Magdalene encountering Jesus there. We read about Jesus appearing to the disciples and coming back again to make sure Thomas had the experience he needed to believe.
But for the majority of Easter, the lectionary doesn’t give us Resurrection readings. It takes us back into John’s Gospel just before Jesus was arrested. If Easter is a celebration of the Resurrection, why do we have these other readings?
Here’s one way of thinking about it. The Resurrection IS the good news—it’s the revelation, the payoff, it’s what changes everything. It’s part of the proof of who Jesus is. It’s why we get charged up for Easter Sunday.
In light of this good news, the lectionary then takes us back to look at the last things Jesus says to his disciples before he is arrested and killed. Why? Jesus did most of his teaching and talking before the Resurrection. What we’ve been listening to and discussing the past few weeks is Jesus’s farewell speech, where he tries to make sure the disciples get all the biggest points of what he taught and modeled for them.
We go back to Jesus’s final words to his disciples, so that we might all take those things to heart, so that we might believe, live into, and spread the good news, as disciples of Christ.
In today’s reading, Jesus has just finished giving this last speech. And what he does here is heartfelt, crucially important, and a model for us whenever we face difficult times.
“After Jesus had spoken these things,” John writes, he looked up to heaven and prayed for his disciples. Jesus wanted them to know, even though he was going away, he is leaving them in the care of his Father.
I want to look at a couple aspects of Jesus’s prayer here. First, he prays specifically for his disciples, his friends. He says:
“I am asking on their behalf, not on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those you gave me, because they are yours.”
We know Jesus to be the savior of the world, as we hear so often in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world…”… But here he’s not praying for the world, he is much more specific.
Praying this prayer for a world that is about to kill Jesus, using these words for a world that has rebelled against the way God intended things to be, wouldn’t make sense here. The disciples are the key to spreading the good news, to fixing things, to spreading God’s love. Jesus’s work in the world is being passed along—they are the ones entrusted with the right words, the knowledge of what needs to be done. Jesus is praying for his friends and the importance of what they have to do.
He knows he is leaving; he is not going to be there to protect them anymore, or to keep them in line; he knows what the world is about to do to him and he wants to keep them from scattering and giving up.
Jesus prays this prayer, out loud and in front of the disciples for their benefit, so they can see and hear him praying. In what he does, he is modeling something for them, which they are going to need, and he is showing them how close he is to the Father, which is how close they are going to need to be without Jesus there.
Jesus asks his Father to protect the disciples. And yet, look at what happened to many of them. They had difficult lives even after the Resurrection. Some were arrested, tortured, and a number of them were killed.
So I want to ask you a question: Did Jesus’s prayer work? Was it answered?
To get our minds around this, I want to talk about what it is to protect someone.
This is Mother’s Day weekend. Happy Mother’s Day to all the amazing moms here. You are so important in so many lives. When we think about protecting the way a mother might protect her children, we are talking about protecting them from harm.
My earliest memory of that kind of protection is when I was three years old. My favorite show was called “Emergency !”, which was about a Los Angeles Fire Department with one fire truck and an ambulance. I had a plastic fire helmet with the Emergency! logo on the front of it that I wore everywhere. I was obsessed with that show.
My cousin and I were playing in the neighbors’ yard next to the water where they had been building up the shoreline with rip rap, and they had a big pile of rocks and dirt. I remember standing on top of that pile, with my Emergency One! fire helmet on thinking I couldn’t be much cooler. We were throwing some chunks of dirt into the river and I wound up to throw as far as I could and tumbled down the pile, over the rip-rapped wall and into the river. I sank like a rock.
But my Emergency! helmet floated. To this day, almost 50 years later, I can look up from the bottom of that river and see that helmet floating. It wasn’t terribly deep, but it was over my head, and I couldn’t swim.
The next thing I knew there was a body breaking through the water, my Mom wrapped her arms around me and pulled me up and out of the river. She wasn’t right there with us, but she was nearby, she heard me tumble down the rock pile and looked and saw my helmet floating on the water.
She said she didn’t have any thoughts in her head, she just reacted, ran to the river, jumped in and pulled me out. For my part, I was a very grateful child: as she wrapped me in a towel and took me inside, I yelled at her for not calling the ambulance, because it would have been cooler if they had saved me.
That’s a mother protecting her child from harm. That’s a very clear and necessary kind of protection.
That’s not the kind of protection Jesus was asking his Father for. He knew that kind of protection didn’t exist for him or for his disciples in a world that had different priorities. They were doing something that was going to put them in harm’s way.
When Jesus prays for the disciples’ protection, he asks for two things:
- Protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one as we are one.
- I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but to protect them from the evil one.
He told them to abide in his love. He wants them to stay in that love, stay connected to God. Jesus knows that the good news, that the coming kingdom, depends on them—that the disciples are going to become His body and do the work of spreading the news to the ends of the earth, so that others might believe.
And he knows that there is pain and suffering, fear and distraction, and evil in the world—all kinds of things that could scatter the disciples.
With all these concerns on his heart, with everything on the line, knowing he is about to be arrested, hauled away, and killed, what does Jesus do?
He looks up to heaven, calls on his Father, and prays for his disciples. John gives us Jesus’s prayer in very theological way that is hard for us to make sense of. I wonder, to our ears, for our time, if it might have sounded something like this:
Dad, they know you. This crew you gave me, this rag-tag group of fishermen, tax collectors, and what all. You should see them, Dad. They might not always understand, but their hearts are in it, they are committed, they don’t give up. They are getting it. And they know it all comes from you. Everything that you’ve shown me, I’ve shown them. And they’re doing us proud.
I’m asking for them. Not for the world; the world who seem to come up with new and cruel and horrible things every day, the world that’s about to kill me… No, I’m asking for them, the ones you gave me, because they are yours.
I’m not going to be here anymore, but they are. They’ve looked to you through me, but I’m won’t to be here, I’m coming to you. I’m worried about them. I know there is a part of me that’s you, Dad, and there’s a part of me that’s like them, and that part of me is worried.
I’ve given them your word and the world hates them for it, just like it hates me, because I don’t belong to the world. The world. This place. This harsh, impossible, beautiful, incredible world. I’m not asking you to take them out of it—they aren’t ready to go where I’m going. But protect them from the evil one. We know what he can do. Keep them close to you and close to each other, that’s the only way this will work. And it has to work.
That’s what all this has been for, that’s why you sent me, that’s why I came, and now I am sending them out, just like you sent me. They can do it. I know they can. But they need your help, just like I do.
I’m setting myself apart, for them. Set them apart, Dad, in your truth. In your love. And it’s about more than them, it’s all those who will believe in me through their words—the people sitting in Christ Church Easton, 2,000 years from now—they won’t know you unless it’s starts with my disciples, my friends.
Dad, the world doesn’t know you. But I know you. And these who you gave me, they know you. And the way you have loved me, I’ve loved them. We’re all in this together. Keep them close to us.
Thanks, Dad. Love you.
Imagine the disciples watching and listening to a prayer like that. What an impact.
Sometimes the protection we need is to stay close to God. Life might take us through some rough places. A good friend who is a clergy person just shared with me his cancer diagnosis. He said, I know I’ve got to let the doctors do what they need to do and that I can’t control that. What I need to do is stay focused on God, stay close to God, through this.
We pray for healing, we pray for good outcomes, and we don’t always have control over those things. But praying, staying connected to and protected by God, gives us something to get us through life’s dangers no matter what happens.
That’s what Jesus wanted for his disciples. That’s what he wants for us.
I think his prayer worked.
Amen.
