Glory
John 17:1-7 Easter 7 Year A 2012
One of the recurring themes of this series on the lectionary is encouragement to preach on what is actually given to us, rather than jumping too quickly to imaginings related to the world we construct behind the text, such as events and motives not actually described or provided. When it’s Luke’s story, preach that, not John’s; when it’s Paul’s letter, expound that etc. Of course the lectionary also invites intertextuality, the practice of reading texts together to see the connections, but that is a discipline of attending to the texts more, rather than less.
All this is hard to honor in Ascensiontide, because the story associated with the Feast is Luke’s exclusive property, at least as a narrative. The Gospel for this Sunday however is John, not Luke, and the framers of the lectionary suggest (rightly I think) that the themes of John’s “high priestly prayer,” as this section in chapter 17 has often been called, are relevant to what Luke’s Ascension stories (Luke 24:50-53; Acts 1:6-14, read today) are also seeking to convey.
This means—brace yourselves—that the Ascension means something more than, or even other than, a story about the eventual physical location of the body of Jesus. Of course the Lukan versions use that narrative of an ascending body to tell us something, but if this is only a sort of tidying-up exercise for the curious (“so what happened to the body of Jesus?”), we are arguably missing the point rather than being pious.
Remember that neither Matthew nor John tell any story of the Ascension (I assume Mark’s ending is either lost or that it was unfinished, hence we can’t be sure what was intended there). Paul does not seem to think that Jesus’ appearance to him years later (1 Cor 15) was essentially different from those that took place at the first Easter, and hence any story he knew about the upwardly-mobile Jesus was beside the point.
But there is a point, implied by the Lukan stories yet more explicitly made in John; and it has to do with glory. The departure of Jesus—which John does of course address, as we have heard recently (ch. 14), despite the lack of any Ascension story—is not so much the tying up of loose ends as the completion of a narrative arc of abasement and glorification.
The anticipation of this final glory in John begins early, in chapter 3 when Jesus tells Nicodemus “No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” So descent and Ascension are clear here as themes already, but the surprising part is that we can already see—knowing the story—that John is speaking of the Cross as the Ascension.
In John, the Cross is the triumph of Jesus, not his abasement; instead of “My God, my God” etc. we have “It is finished.” Now the Son of Man has been lifted up, and his work accomplished. Early Christian depictions of the Cross—slow to emerge at all, compared to some other images and stories—tend to emphasize this triumph and accomplishment rather than the (more Synoptic?) presentation of suffering and abandonment.
This identification of Cross and Ascension is meant to be taken utterly seriously, but it is not an alternative historical timeline, as such. In John, time itself is different; where in the Synoptic tradition, following Mark, Jesus’ glory can only be understood by the characters at and after the Cross, in John it is available at any point. And this different view of time and eternity applies to the implied reader too, since “Very truly, I tell you, anyone who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life, and does not come under judgement, but has passed from death to life” (5:24).
So in John 17 it is not so surprising that time itself seems to have stopped. Jesus has shared his extended farewell discourse with the disciples and now addresses the Father. Past, present, and future seem to mingle as Jesus calls on the Father to glorify him, but speaks at some points as though this has already happened, or is happening at this very moment: “And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you” (v. 11).
If the identity of Ascension and Cross is one part of the distinctive Johannine presentation of Jesus’ glorification, the Gospel today presents us with another, which is the mode of Jesus’ ongoing presence, or of ours. Again, we have seen that John does envisage a departure (and I assume John knows the Lukan stories of the Ascension, but that’s another matter), but uniquely emphasizes the presence of Jesus abiding in the community that he (paradoxically) is leaving.
“All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them.”
As often, the lectionary might end a little short; while we finish at v. 11 this Sunday, the prayer goes on:
“As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (vv. 21-23).
These verses make even clearer that the community of believers have entered into a kind of unity with Jesus (the vine image of course had helped with this just a little earlier in this farewell discourse, ch. 15) and, since he is in union with the Father, they are too.
The references in John to the Paraclete (Advocate) woven through this farewell discourse are also important, but we only get to read them on Pentecost (and not even that, this year). The point however is that while John acknowledges a departure for Jesus, the community of believers is given another kind of presence. In fact, the emphasis here in the ‘high priestly prayer” is not so much divine presence in them (us), but their presence in God (“they are no longer in the world,” we even read at v. 16). And since this indwelling is supremely important, and the believers are no longer in the world either, but share in Jesus’s glory, the emphasis in John is not on the departure of Jesus’ body as such, but on the fact that where Jesus is, we are too.
Jesus has ascended, and we have ascended, yet the Advocate is here with is too. The cycle of glory is complete, not because the body of Jesus is unaccounted for, but because the mission of Jesus is complete and we are one with him, in heaven and on earth.