A Different Thing, Altogether

A sermon by Jamie Howison from May 16, 2021, on John 17:6-19

As a preacher I’m always most at home when the readings appointed for the day are stories. Stories are what we remember, whether parables or the various events in the life of Jesus, or those rich and sometimes very odd stories from the Hebrew scriptures. Not only do we remember them, but we can also engage them imaginatively, seeing parts of the human condition so clearly reflected in the characters of the story. Oh, I know why Thomas so desperately needed proof before he could believe, or I can see why having all that unquestioned power led King David to imagine he could so casually arrange for his adulterous fling with the woman next door, or I totally understand why Mary and Martha were kind of miffed that Jesus hadn’t come in time to heal their brother Lazarus. As for even the most familiar of the parables—the Prodigal Son, say, or the Pharisee and the Tax Collector—they often bear new fruit even after countless readings. I’m in agreement with the theologian Stanley Hauerwas who claims that the church is a story-formed community. And our first stories are biblical.

But we don’t have a story tonight, but rather a piece from the closing section of the 1st Epistle of John, and a piece of the chapter-length prayer Jesus offers in the Gospel according to John, right before he leaves with the disciples to go to the Garden of Gethsemane. That prayer is sometimes called Jesus’ “high priestly prayer”, and it is pretty dense stuff, really quite unlike the compact prayer Jesus offers when his disciples ask him to teach them to pray, which we call the Lord’s Prayer. N.T. Wright says that this very long prayer from John 17 has a texture “so rich that we may choke on it unless we chew slowly,” which I think is a really apt way to describe it.

One of the people who has chewed slowly on this text is Steve Bell, whose song “This is Love” from his 1997 album Romantics and Mystics is an improvisational take on John 17. This is how the song opens:

Father just before the hour comes
That was set aside to glorify Your Son
With a glory from before the world began
With a glory given to no other man

Protect the ones You’ve given me to love
I so desire that none of them be lost
They’ve yet to understand the mystery
Why the Son of God would wash another’s feet

But this is not the same
It’s a different thing
Altogether
This is love

I well remember the first time I heard Steve sing this song. It was in the autumn of 1997, and I was the chaplain at St John’s College at the University of Manitoba. I’d arranged to have Robert Farrar Capon come to deliver two lectures, one of which was to be held in the college café in the early afternoon. Because Robert was not particularly widely known in that university context, I had Steve come and do a twenty-minute set to open the event, knowing that he would be a “draw” for an audience. He ended that brief set with “This is Love,” and as the song moved to its close it was these words that knocked me out: “Here’s something that they won’t like”—“they” meaning the disciples, who are still trying to get their heads wrapped around what kind of a kingdom Jesus is inaugurating.

Here’s something that they won’t like
Someone’s coming to take the life
No one has to look farther than me
I am he

Some will trust in the things they think they know
They should think again and let them go
Put away the sword and get behind
And let me die

 And then back to the chorus, with,

’cause this is not the same,
It’s a different thing
All together
This is not the same
It’s a better thing
All together
This is love

Yet for whom is this love expressed? Well, the text of Jesus’ prayer has the disciples most clearly in view; disciples said to be “in the world” even when Jesus himself is leaving it. At first glance it might seem like “the world” is little more than a brutally hostile place— “the world has hated them,” Jesus says, “because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world”—and that can create an almost gnostic tension that says that the world, physical bodies, and matter are somehow inherently corrupt, leaving only the spiritual to be good or redeemable. That, however, is not a fair reading of the worldview in play in the Gospel according to John. Here N.T. Wright comments,

‘The world’, remember, in this gospel doesn’t mean simply the physical universe as know it. It means the world insofar as it has rebelled against God, has chosen darkness rather than light, and has organized itself to oppose the creator. Seen from within that ‘world’, Jesus is ‘from’ elsewhere. So too, we now discover to our surprise, are the disciples.

They aren’t determined or shaped by rebellion against how things were intended to be; aren’t shaped by the things that in the 4th Century Evagrius identified as the things to be overcome: pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth. They aren’t shaped, in other words, by that which turns us in toward ourselves, but rather by that which gives life. Love, in short, and the kind of love that stoops to wash another’s feet.

But is that love reserved only for the disciples and for those who will learn from them and in turn will rise above self-centredness and rebellion? Is love merited, in short? Or maybe parcelled out only to those whom God has selected as being good recipients, and able to transcend the brokenness of the world?

No. No, and that is clear if this long prayer from John 17 is set in the context of the whole of the Gospel, which is something Steve has done with his song and something Meda Stamper insists is crucial to understanding the prayer. After reminding the reader that one should not dismiss this Gospel’s most famous verse—John 3:16, “For God so loved the world”—she comments,

If the broken world isn’t the one that is so beloved, then the lifting up of the Son makes no sense. Jesus need not die if he is only in the world for the sake of the people who like him. And Jesus’ own people will not be in danger if they are to bear fruit in happy isolation. The reason that they are mirroring the union of the Father and Son and carrying the love of God and Jesus for them into the world that doesn’t know God is precisely that God loves that world and wants it to know that love.

And perhaps after that quick passing reference to John 3:16, I’d do well to close with John 3:17: “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” Even in its brokenness and rebellion and lostness, to save the world through him. This is love. It really is.

And that is my story for tonight, the final Sunday of Eastertide.