“The Good-Bye Prayer”
7th Sunday of Easter
John 17:20-26
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History is littered with what we like to call “famous last words.” We seem to be fascinated with the final words a person utters, as if they hold a clue to who the person essentially was. If the person happened to know they were dying, then we are especially interested in their words, in case we might learn something about what death will be like. They are treading into territory we haven’t yet visited, and we hope they might give us some word that will light the way for us.
The impulse to record the dying words of famous people has led to some pressure on those people to say something especially important.
When the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa was gunned down in an ambush, he was reported to have said as he was dying, “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”
The French grammarian, Dominique Bouhours, took the chance to give one last lesson. His final words supposedly were, “I am about to – or I am going to – die: either expression is correct.”
Karl Marx famously defied the expectation to offer pearls of wisdom from his deathbed. His housekeeper had come in with a notepad in hopes of recording his words. So his last words ended up being, “Go, get out – last words are for fools who haven’t said enough.”
Jesus, of course, had many last words recorded. Sometimes we call them the “Seven last words” – seven different statements he said from the cross, each with their own significance. But the Gospel of John gives special attention to the last words Jesus said before the cross. These, too, were the words of a dying man. They were spoken by a man already on his way to the grave and he knew it. He sat there in the upper room with his friends, eating and talking, in the hours before he stepped out into the night that would bring his arrest and, ultimately, his execution. He knew what lay ahead for him, and he spent the meal sharing his last thoughts with his friends. For four chapters, John tells us what he said there. This morning’s reading gives us the last of those last words. What Jesus finally leaves his friends with is not instruction, but a prayer.
No doubt many people have said prayers as their last words. Some of those prayers have been for God to keep them from death. Some of those prayers have been for death to come, and swiftly. Jesus’ prayer is for those left behind.
Right before his prayer begins, he ends his instruction to his disciples with the strong words: “Take courage! I have conquered the world!” He knows, of course, that it will not look like he is a victor. He will hang on a cross the next day, and no one will take that to mean he has conquered the world. It will be very hard for any of them to take courage. He knows this.
His immediate followers would not be the only ones who struggled to stay brave and true. In the centuries since he said these words, there have been so many signs that he has not, in fact, triumphed. It looks very little like Jesus has conquered the world. It is hard for some of us to believe in him at all, let alone to believe that his way of love and peace has prevailed, and to keep pursuing that way ourselves.
Jesus knows that if his followers are going to carry on his work of love and grace in the face of everything that opposes that, we are going to need more than just his words. We are going to need his power. We are going to need his presence. We are going to need his prayer.
And this is how he gives it. In the hour of his own greatest need, he faces God with courage – and he prays for us. He prays for those friends huddled around him in that room, and he prays for all those of us who will come after them and seek to follow still. He prays for the church – the church then, the church now, the church to come. In other words, he prays for us.
And what he prays is this: They are yours, God. These people are yours. They are in this world, and they do not belong to it, but I have sent them into it. Protect them. Make them one, Let your love be in them. Let the world know your love through them. You, be in them, and with them, and keep them. Keep them from evil. They are yours. Help them know it. As you Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us. Let them be one, as we are one. Let the love with which you have loved me be in them.
Jesus knows that his ways of self-giving love are under siege. In the face of such opposition and pressure, a community can do one of two things – it can splinter, or it can cohere. The final words of his prayer are for our unity. He lifts his voice to God and says, “I ask … that they may be one.”
That oneness is meant not merely for our own enjoyment. It is for our mission. Christian unity bears witness to the unity of Jesus with God. John Chrysostom, an early Christian bishop, argued that the world could come to believe in Jesus by seeing the transformed lives of Jesus’ followers, and that that transformation would be most obvious by the fact that Christian disciples were living in peace with one another. He wrote that the world “would know the teacher by his disciples.” When Christian community exists in harmony and unity, it points to Jesus, the teacher of peace. When Christian community breaks down, its failure and conflict and chaos undermine its mission to the world.
Jesus does not pray that we would all believe the same, or worship the same, or feel the same. He prayed that we would be one. And he doesn’t command our unity, he prays for it, which is to say that he knows we can’t do it on our own. Our unity is grounded not in ourselves, but in God. Christian community is not a result of human effort; it is a result of the oneness of God among us.
What this means is that the wholeness and unity of our community is based not on dogma, not on opinion, not on feelings, and not on efforts, but on a shared experience of God dwelling among us. In the end, this is the reason our whole community has come into being – because we have had a transformative encounter with the living God through Jesus.
This is what drew those first struggling believers together. They had experienced something in Jesus that radically changed them. After he was resurrected, they had fresh encounters with him that made it impossible for them to go back to their old understandings and old ways. They would still fail, and they would still struggle. But their lives were linked to Jesus and to each other in a way that made their community bigger than all their failures. They were made one by Jesus. They were made one in love and one in purpose. That purpose was to witness to the transformative resurrection power of God that they had experienced in Jesus.
That is our purpose, too, of course. To have a living relationship with God through Christ, and to bear witness to that.
Jesus’ prayer was for his immediate followers as well as for the church universal from that day to this day and forward to the last day. But the prayer was not just for Christians in general, it was for us, specifically. Jesus prayed this prayer, and prays this prayer specifically for First Baptist Church of Ann Arbor. Can we see evidence of its being answered?
Jesus prays that we may be one. Not united by our shared theology. Certainly not united in our shared politics. Not together simply because we have a lot of stuff in common, or just because we enjoy each other’s company. We are together because of our relationship with him. We are united by God’s work in us and among us. We become one through our shared experience of his love and our common mission to share that love.
Is Jesus’ prayer being answered among us? Do we, as individuals and as a community of faith, have a living and active and transforming relationship with God in Christ? Is that relationship our central purpose? Are we experiencing something in our relationship with God that we cannot help but share in word and deed?
If the answer to any of those questions is no, Jesus shows us the way. He does not give us an instruction book on how to be his church. He lets us hear him pray. He shows us what it means to have a real and vital and intimate relationship with God. He expects us to pursue that relationship too. He expects us to pray, as he did. And he keeps on praying for us, too. Scripture tells us that he still intercedes for us. Even now, there are prayers on his lips, prayers for us, that we may know God, that we may be one.
In some ways that is an outrageous request – that we might be one. But if we can’t address our biggest, wildest hopes toward God, then to whom can we tell them? We are in this world, but we do not belong to it. We are not meant to be possessed by it. We belong to God. We are meant to be possessed by a vision far bolder and far grander than the small, selfish dreams our commercialized culture tells us to have. My dream is of a church pulsing with the life of God. My prayer is for a church that throbs with the vitality of the living Christ and holds together because we have been made one by our love for him and by his love in us. My hope is for that love to make such a difference in our own lives that we can’t help but go out and share it. That is what we were brought into being for.
Every day Jesus is praying this prayer over each of our lives, and over the life of our church. They are yours, God. Let your love be in them. Make them one. And let the world know your love through them. His prayer for us does not cease. What is left for us now, but to join our prayers with his, and lift our lives and the life of this church to God, that God might shape it to be an answer to such a prayer as this.
As Jesus prayed, so may we live.