Have you ever been betrayed? Or worse, have you ever betrayed? Ponder these awful possibilities for a moment to imagine the injury and sorrow inflicted when trust is betrayed. We heard reflections today in early Christianity about this dark event of betrayal that occurred when, as Peter tells, Judas became a guide for those who arrested Jesus-- for Judas was numbered among us and was allotted his share in this ministry. Peter interprets Judas’s betrayal of trust by prophecy of Scripture which had to be fulfilled. Likewise the Jesus of the Gospel of John declares: I guarded them, and not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be fulfilled. The dark experience of betrayal thus generates the very dark interpretation of destiny. Could Judas have done otherwise? Was he fated to betray? That is a speculative question best reserved for the back-and-forth of discussion in the classroom.
What matters to the Scriptures today is an affirmation of faith: that even when Jesus had fallen into the hands of traitors and persecutors, he has not fallen out of the hand of God. And this confidence in our divine destination to salvation applies also to us, disciples of Jesus. So Jesus prays: I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. Jesus as much as says in the hearing of his disciples, “I never promised you a rose garden, ” but only strength to endure. For, if we are truly disciples of Jesus, we will experience the same enmity of the world as he did. We will experience enmity because we are in the world but we do not belong, heart and soul and conscience, we do not belong to the world. History is not God but more often than not the triumph of unrighteous victors in the lying games of partisan power politics, if not open war. By contrast, Jesus emphasizes: Disciples do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. That’s our situation: set apart, conformed to Jesus by the word and fortified by the Spirit, we are made strong to be like Jesus vulnerable witnesses to a truth that the world does not heed, or even perceive. The light of this witness of Jesus and consequently of the disciples of Jesus is the light shining in real darkness.
Perhaps we realize these hard truths afresh in these days when everything seems to be spin and propaganda bombards us, incoming from every angle, while polarizing tensions, wars and rumors of war seem to accelerate, dashing bygone hopes of human progress on planet Earth. Lest we succumb to despair, it is imperative today that we focus closely upon the liberating truth of Jesus, not only so that we hold onto it as the ark of our salvation in the raging seas of malice and injustice, but in fact shine with its light in a storm-darkening world. So what is this word of truth that sanctifies?
Jesus begins his prayer-discourse discourse today with a striking formulation: I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. What is he talking about? Don’t we all know already the name of God? Isn’t his name, well, just “God?” Actually, that is not so. In the Bible, the word “God” is not a name but a title, as we can understand from the old-fashioned expression “the one true God,” that is, the one who is truly God, the character who truly deserves this title. That is why there can be many and various false gods, authorities, celebrities, powers, movements, and anything else under the sun claiming to be the key to the riddle of history and the ultimate meaning of human life on the earth. How are we to pick out the one true God even today when “the Western way of life,” or “the Russian world,” or the Marxist-Leninism of communist China, or the Shiite revolution of Iran with its proxy forces in Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis and their campus followers in the universities of the United States, or messianic forms of Zionism – shall I continue? – when one and all claim our allegiance? Which represents the one true God? How shall we pick this one out?
Into this cauldron of confusion, Jesus speaks: I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. Note well, in giving us the personal name of God, Jesus means precisely to deliver us from the world of contested and contesting idolatries claiming our final allegiance, to deliver us from ever more fanatical conflict. So what is this name of God which delivers us? Jesus prays, Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.
As happens so often in the Gospel of John, here we have Jesus expressing the deeper truth of the Lord’s Prayer which we have learned from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Especially how it begins, “Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name.” Jesus names the God of Israel, the one true God who is creator of all that is not God, who loves all creatures and wills for them abundant blessing, Holy Father. And he immediately explains how this naming of God works to identify Jesus as the beloved Son of the Holy Father. Just as in the Lord’s prayer we address the one true God is also our Father at the invitation and in union with Jesus the Son, so also in John’s exposition, the will of God is done on earth as in heaven when each believer is united to the Father through the Son; each believer is therewith also united with all the other believers in one flock under one shepherd.
Certainly there is a problem of sensitivities here. Some believers have suffered from violent or abusive fathers and find it difficult to address God in this way, especially if they are erroneously thinking that Christian prayer is a projection of our human experiences onto the divine. Certainly there is also scriptural warrant for feminine metaphors for the one true God. Jesus would gather the people of Jerusalem like a hen gathers the chicks under her wings. Paul the apostle is in travail until he gives birth to his children in Christ. But a metaphor which tells us what something is like is not the same as a name which picks an individual out of the crowd to identify it personally.
That is precisely what the name of God, Holy Father, does: it picks from out of all the various candidates for divinity in the contested and contesting world of darkness and confusion the One who has given his name to the beloved Son, Jesus, in order to give it to us as well, so that we be delivered into the loving unity of Christian faith. And notice as well that this does not name an earthly father, but the heavenly Holy Father, the Father who is in heaven and not on the earth. The Holy Father of the beloved Son Jesus is anything but a projection of our human experiences of fatherhood. Such projection would be just another idol. Rather, by this fatherhood of Jesus all true fatherhood on the earth is measured – a sharp judgment against all unholy fathers on earth who use and abuse defenseless little one entrusted to their care.
What a distance we have traveled in the sermon! From the experience of betrayal to the confidence that nevertheless the God of love will prevail for us. Our sins are many but finite, the love of the Holy Father of the beloved Son Jesus is boundless, infinite.
And this movement is a fitting way to conclude the Easter season, just as Jesus concludes the prayer in what is often called his Farewell Discourse: And now I am no longer in the world, but the disciples are in the world… As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth. People have odd ideas about holiness or sanctity. It is often justly lampooned as puritanical repression or sanctimonious self-righteousness. But in the Bible holiness is really about the divine power of belonging, being picked out by the Spirit, gathered in for holy communion, destined for eternal salvation. This act of making holy, of sanctification, begins with the resurrection of the crucified, dead, and buried Jesus, shrouded in the sin of the world which he forgave in his Father’s name and whose burden he took upon himself. On this unfathomable act of faithful love, the Holy Father on Easter morn said yes and amen. And so the Holy Spirit raised Jesus from the dead and exalted him as our Savior and Lord.
Therefore, this is the testimony: God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life. And where there is life, there is holiness and sanctification. The elder who has written 1 John, from whom we have heard so often in these weeks of the Easter season, wraps up our meditation this morning with his concluding words: I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life. The name is Jesus sent by the Holy Father for us and our salvation. Now we await the Pentecost manifestation of the Holy Spirit to complete the revelation of the Holy Trinity, the God of the gospel.