Psalm
66: 7–18 / Acts 17: 22–31 / John 14: 15–21
This
is the homily provided for the people of St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania
by Fr. Gene Tucker for Sunday, May 17, 2020. This homily was not delivered as
part of our Sunday morning worship, because St. John’s is currently closed due
to the COVID – 19 viral outbreak. Instead, it was provided via electronic means
and in hard copy to those without email.)
“WELCOMED
INTO THE INNER LIFE OF GOD”
(Homily
text: John 14: 15-21)
In our appointed Gospel text for this morning, we
hear the Lord’s statement, “I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”
(John 14:20b)
Perhaps, in your childhood, you had an experience
that was much like mine: When a group of us would get together and decide to
play a game where two teams were involved, we’d choose two captains, one for
each team, and then those two captains would choose the members of their teams.
I am reluctant to admit it, but I was almost always the last one, or the
next-to-the-last one, chosen. I think that’s because the captains knew about my
athletic abilities, or – more correctly – my lack of athletic abilities. In
reality, I wasn’t one of the inner circle of more talented players. (Never fear, I’ve gotten over this.)
Transfer that scenario into today’s Gospel text.
Jesus is speaking to His disciples as the Last
Supper unfolds. (Recall that John devotes all of chapters thirteen through
seventeen to a narration of Jesus’ interchanges with the disciples.) He speaks
from the context of the commonly-held beliefs of His day, beliefs that had
shaped and molded that original group of followers as devout Jews.
But in the course of His conversation with them, He
must remold and remake their expectations, those expectations they had grown up
with.
We would do well to take a brief look at the
commonly-held ideas that were commonplace among God’s people in that day, time
and place.
We might begin by remembering that God’s people
believed that God was remote and removed from everyday life. To be sure, they
all believed that God had spoken and had acted powerfully in times past. God’s
people possessed the written record of God’s mighty, saving acts in those
“good, old days”, but God didn’t act that same way in their own time, and He hadn’t
acted that way in quite awhile.
Those disciples believed that God’s connection to
people was mediated through the covenant God had made with their ancestors many
hundreds of years before. We know this covenant by the name the Torah. The Torah came between God and His people, and scrupulous adherence
to its requirements – even down to the smallest detail (many of those details
were additions and accretions to the law itself) - was the way one demonstrated
that they were blood descendants of Abraham.
The cumulative effect of this conception of the
relationship between God and people was that the life of God was closed off to
humankind. God, it was believed, tolerated His people, but – unlike the days of
old when God deliberately chose to relate to His people – in the time of our
Lord’s earthly ministry, God didn’t really interact with people directly. God
was “out there” somewhere, but wasn’t present, not really.
Into this situation, Jesus comes, and announces
that God is acting powerfully right in front of the eyes of those original
disciples, and that there is an ongoing, willing relationship between God and
people. He, Himself, is the one who has opened the eyes of those who would come
to faith to see that God and His Son, Jesus the Christ, are in one another. (Allow me to remark, at this point, that the understanding
of the relationship between God the Father and God the Son is such that they
are so perfectly joined, connected, to one another that it is impossible to
tell, exactly, where their distinctions end and their commonality begins. There’s
a technical term that theologians use for this, coming to us from the Greek. It
is: Perichoresis.)
How wonderful it is to know that the Father and the
Son are one (see John 10:30). How much more wonderful to know that the Son has
not only opened to way to the Father for all those who come to believe (see
last week’s Gospel reading, John 14:1 – 14), but that we’ve been invited onto
the team, chosen as the first choice, chosen to be in God’s inner circule,
chosen willingly. We’ve been invited, by virtue of the Son’s having chosen us,
to enter into the inner life of God.
Guess that truth means that you and I are pretty
important in the sight of God, huh?
Amazing stuff, this.
AMEN.
