Jesus Last Request

John 17:1-11

June 1, 2014

Boy, Jesus has been pretty chatty

here these last few weeks.

They call this portion of John the Farewell Discourse, it runs

Chapters 14 through 17. That’s a lot to say.

The other three gospels kind of portray

Jesus as a guy who doesn’t say enough.

And what he does say,

he says in stories and parables that are relatively easy to follow.

Not easy to understand, but at least easy to follow.

But in John, Jesus just seems to talk philosophically.

It’s almost like I have to diagram the sentence to see

what the subject and verb is.

Even here in this week’s gospel, Jesus is closing out his

farewell discourse with a prayer.

Prayers are usually simple, and this one is in the end,

but there’s a whole preamble in this prayer that’s a little confusing

Jesus says to God,

“I glorified you on earth by doing what you wanted me to

I made your name known

They know everything that has been given me is from you

I’m asking this for them, not for me, but on their behalf

all mine are yours, and yours are mine.”

That’s confusing.

but the actual content of the prayer is fairly simple.

Jesus just says:

“God, protect my followers,

so that they can be as close to one another as I am to you.”

 Jesus was praying for his followers, For the church.

For us in other words.

That we could be as close to each other as God is to Jesus.

That is Jesus’s whole prayer, that is where God’s glory is found.

It takes a lot for John to get there,

but it’s beautiful to think that that is Jesus last prayer.

Now, does your mind ever wander off

while someone is talking?

Like when pastors are preaching.

My mind does.

Especially if someone is talking a lot about things that I don’t quite get,

it’s hard to focus on what they say.

I hear the voice, but I don’t comprehend.

Like the adults’ voices in Charlie Brown cartoons.

I have to think that’s what was happening with the disciples.

Jesus was talking for a long time and

Maybe they just drifted off

and started thinking about different things while Jesus was talking.

So maybe no one was listening.

When Jesus prayed for this.

“Help my followers to be as close to each other as I am to you.”

I have to think that the disciples weren’t

paying attention when Jesus spoke

because they seem to forget his prayer almost instantly.

Right in the beginning, Peter and Paul start fighting and

Writing letters about how wrong the other was.
Talking bad about each other in their churches.

Paul and John, who was also called Mark,

start off working together, but then they part ways and

Paul starts complaining about him to Barnabas.

Then Barnabas and Paul start fighting about things.

We don’t have a good beginning examples of Christian unity

and we don’t have a good history of it either.

Whenever you talk about Christian unity, it seems vaguely hypocritical.

It’s hard to pick out a time when Christians

were unified in the same spirit that Jesus wanted us to.

Even before the Reformation when we were

at least one church, the unity was kept with threats and violence.

For the entire time he was alive after breaking from the Catholic Church,

Luther was involved in heated debates with other reformers

about how the new church should live it’s life.

The Lutheran Church in America has spent the last 200 years

trying to get together and just when it looks like everything is working out for the ELCA, hundreds of churches leave over the issue of sexuality.

It doesn’t take an expert in religious studies

to see that Christians have trouble getting along.

All you have to do is post any opinion you might have on

a Christian page and see that most people don’t agree about anything .

And some Christians are willing to curse at you,

call you names, and even threaten

bodily harm to you when they do disagree.

There are thousands of churches created out of Christian disagreement.

There are wars created out of Christian disagreement.

Beheadings, death by fire,

all sorts of horrible stuff because we just can’t get along.

Even at the personal level,

in most churches you can

Just sing the wrong song, or change the drapes,

or misplace something in the kitchen

and you can start a small war.

We’re all better than that here, of course.

So maybe the church has been daydreaming

when Jesus was praying this last prayer:

“God help my followers to be as close to each other as I am to you.”

And you know, I have to say, there are some Christians,

I don’t want to be unified with.
That couple that wrote a book that said that the best way to raise

children is to beat them and withhold food if they disobey.

That turkey in Florida that burned the Koran.

The people from the Westboro Baptist Church who protest

at funerals because they don’t like gay people.

I really don’t want to be known as unified with

some of these loose screws out there.

So maybe I’ve been sleeping.

Maybe we’ve all been sleeping, drifting off,

balancing our checkbooks in our mind while Jesus has been talking.

Jesus who gave us everything, has just one last request.

That we be as close to each other as Jesus is to God.

And from the outside it looks like we’ve pretty much ignored it.

Today as well as hearing Jesus’s last prayer

we also hear about the Ascension.

The story about the time after Jesus’s resurrection

when he was taken away, right in front the disciples.

Right before he’s taken up, the disciples ask him one more time,

“So are you gonna restore the kingdom to Israel now?”

Which is just funny in itself and proves that they have been daydreaming

most of the time that Jesus was talking.

But then Jesus is taken up and you see them doing a very natural thing.
They follow Jesus up to the sky, where’d he go?

What do we do now. Come back to us and clear everything up.

And those two mystical figures in the white robes

give the first good and most ignored

advice to any church and any Christians.

“What are you looking up there for?

What are you standing there staring into heaven like that?”

Why are you looking for God and Jesus up there?

That’s not where you’re going to find Jesus.

Staring up into the great by and by trying

to discipher the all the right answers, all the right interpretations.

That’s not how you should be the church.

And hen we ignore that, we inevitably lose our way.

When we have our head in the clouds trying so hard to unite with God,

When we miss the people around us,

That has been the downfall of the church from the start.

We spend so much time trying

to link up with God up there.

That we forget that the way God

decided to show himself to us was down here.

As another human being.  Another person.

With flesh and blood and hands and feet and a mind and

difficult moods and strange opinions that are different from us.

The story of Ascension and Jesus prayer remind us that
We don’t find God’s glory by unifiying with that vague concept that

we understand as God and God’s will.

We find God’s glory by unifiying with one another.

Christians have usually done church

by looking up into the sky

and day dreaming about what God wants.

But Jesus has asked us to do church with our heads down.

Looking into one another’s eyes.

I could be as right as rain, have all the right answers –

I know I’ve got a better handle on theology than

The Westboro Baptist Church or Pat Robertson,

But if I can’t look them both in the eyes and see children of God,

then my theology and thoughts and concepts are just dry bones.

If we have all the right answers,

but can’t look into one another’s eyes

and see children of God, then what are we doing here?

Jesus’s one dying wish is that as a

Christian that I be compassionate instead of being right.

I don’t know that I’ve always made that choice.

I don’t know that Christianity has made that choice.

So has the church throughout all it’s years gotten it wrong?

Do we stubbornly refuse to do the one thing that Jesus prayed for?

Have we failed at being the church?

Maybe we’ve ignored the work that Jesus would have us do.

Or maybe the work is just very hard.

Maybe this one last prayer of Jesus

is the most difficult thing that we can do.

Maybe it’s just something that takes 2000 or more years to sort out.

Jesus last prayer:

that we could be as close to one another as Jesus is to God.

It’s a prayer in progress.

All we can do is promise that we’ll keep on trying.

and trust that the Spirit will always be here to help.