+ In nomine Domini.  Amen.

Today is the Seventh and therefore the final Sunday of Easter.  Our Easter Season continues through the days of this week and comes to an end this Saturday, which means that next Sunday is the Church’s Feast of Pentecost, fifty days after Easter.

Our seven-week-long Sermon concludes this morning.  Let’s see where we have been:

Easter Sunday, the First Sunday of Easter told us from Matthew’s Gospel, by way of Mary Magdalene and Mary the Mother of James, that Jesus is risen from the dead. 

The Second Sunday of Easter brought us to the Gospel of John’s story of the double-appearance of the risen Jesus to his followers, with special emphasis upon Thomas who was determined to see the evidence for himself.

The story of the risen Jesus appearing to a couple on their way from Jerusalem to Emmaus came to us from the Gospel of Luke on the Third Sunday of Easter.

The week after, on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, we turned to a pre-Resurrection story in John’s Gospel where after healing a man who was blind from birth, Jesus has a discussion with a small group of religious leaders who were intent on helping people  return to a pure and holy religious life by following a strict code of rules – the group called the Pharisees.  The discussion turned on the question of whether this code was not a blindness itself.  The story also compelled this group to consider Jesus like a good shepherd who guards the flock and brings them in and out of the sheep-corral safely.

Another pre-Resurrection story was told to us on the Fifth Sunday of Easter, also in the Gospel According to John, which took place around a Passover Meal where, during the conversation, Jesus speaks words of comfort to his followers, and claims that God who is a God of the future and holds that future secure is also a God who is present in the very person of Jesus.

Last week on the Sixth Sunday of Easter the story of that meal continued and at its very conclusion, Jesus commits those who follow him to love him by keeping his commandments which are: Love God, love your neighbor as you would love yourself.  The reading was made poignant for us since the day of holocaust remembrance (Yom Ha Shoah) took place later in the week; and we brought to our memories the times when followers of Jesus did not obey his commandments.  We reminded ourselves that following Jesus is not only an individual commitment but a communal one as well.

Now we are at the end, and this Sunday the Gospel reading is again from John, Chapter 17.  What has taken place since last week’s reading from Chapter 14 is two chapter’s worth of Jesus’ encouragement and teaching of those around him.  Now we are at what is called in biblical study the “High Priestly Prayer of Jesus” … or more easily Jesus’ Final Prayer, his last words to his followers … because following this prayer, Jesus and his followers get up from the meal walk across the Kidron valley and climb up to a little garden of olive trees where he is betrayed by Judas and arrested by a group of local police and Roman soldiers.

It’s interesting that we end the Easter Season by returning again to the events of Holy Week … it’s a full-circle of sorts that is there, at least liturgically, to remind us of the central meaning of Christianity, this Jesus who teaches love, peace, tolerance, forgiveness, and hope is the one who dies and is raised to life by God … the Gospel in a nutshell. 

And so before the end comes, Jesus prays.  And he prays not for himself, but for those he leaves behind. 

Now are these the actual words of Jesus, was there such a prayer that Jesus prayed in this distinctive way that the author of the Gospel According to John wrote?  Not really.  We have to understand this prayer against the background of the common patterns of “biography” of the time.[1]  The gospels of our Christian Writings are biographies, of a sense … and the customary thing to do when portraying someone’s life was to try and put it all into an essential message for future generations, found in the accounts of a person’s last words, and sometimes their final prayer.

Just like in the 16^th Century, when Luther lies on his deathbed and says about God’s love and grace, “We are all beggars” … or at least that is one story of what he said.  And just like in the 20^th Century on the last night of his life, Martin Luther King, Jr. says, “I’ve been to the mountaintop … I’ve see the Promised Land …”

We hold onto those words because they crystallize something of the person for us who follow after; and, so it is with John’s portrayal of Jesus, written near the very end of the 1^st Century, some 60 years and more after Jesus himself.  John has creatively imagined what Jesus might have said, what would be the very essence of things for him in his final prayer.  In doing this John draws upon older traditions known to him, some reaching back to Jesus himself.  Many people find in the 17^th Chapter influence from the Lord’s Prayer, for example.

The prayer as John constructs it is a conversation between Jesus and God that is not private, but public.  In other words, Jesus prays to God in front of his followers; they are listening in on the conversation … and … and this is the whole point of John’s Gospel … so are we.  The prayer is there in such a way that when we read it, we find ourselves reclining around the Passover Table next to Peter, James, John and Thaddeus and so on … listening with them to what Jesus is saying.

What does he say to God?

1.  The hour has come.
2.  Glorify me, so I may glorify you.
3.  I have done the work you sent me to do.
4.  I made known your name to those whom you gave me.
5.  They now understand this.
6.  I am coming to you, but they will remain here.
7.  Protect them, and by all means …
8.  Let them be one.

There it is, eight things that Jesus says in the prayer.  He doesn’t say, “Mission accomplished, Father.”  No, rather the sense and meaning of it is that the work continues beyond just one person, even Jesus … the work continues and is done by those who follow him, who obey his commandments to love God and love neighbor.  It doesn’t stop.

And, for those who listen to the story, it goes on not just inside them (again there is no personal piety here, Jesus is not personal Lord and Saviour) … the work continues in what is outside, external … and it happens in a community, not just in one individual.

I’m reminded of my final year at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg (I bow to the East) … where a significant group of new students who were very pious and pretty righteous came into the body.  They were very good at praying long, extended petitions before the Almighty.

One day at Friday chapel, which was when we had our weekly Eucharist (since the campus was mostly vacant on weekends … we having been sent out as supply preachers in the many congregations throughout Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West Virginia) … one day when the renowned Dr. Robert Jenson was preaching the sermon, he finally got to the point and said, “Why are some of you praying like this … ‘Dear Jesus, help us feel better about the poor.  Help us think more peacefully.  Help us to remember those who are losing their lives in Vietnam.’  What in the world kind of prayer is that?!  It doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t ask for much of anything at all!  Rather say, “Jesus, feed the poor, and make us be the ones to do it.  Bring peace in the world, and make us be the peacemakers.  End the war in Vietnam, and let us be those who work like crazy for that end!”

It’s in that sense that Jesus prays for his followers, prays for us in this story.  It’s a bit romanticized by John’s pen, but the point is still there … he doesn’t say, “Help these poor disciples of mine to feel good about themselves, and share their inner child with one another …”  He says, “They are doing the work now, protect them, watch over them, make them one!”

That’s what he says to us.  Stay focused, don’t get into the wrong discussions, don’t be led away from the life of the Gospel, do the work, be good followers, and by all means, do it together!”

I think that’s enough of an Easter Sermon; now the work begins for us to take the stories we have heard and put them into what we say and what we do.

Deo Gratia
The Rev. Benjamin Larzelere III