God of Relationship
based on John 17:20-26
Rev. Karen Goltz

            All four gospels are primarily concerned with telling the story of Jesus, telling about his life, his death, and his resurrection.  All four of them have that in common.  But all four of them are telling that story for very different reasons.

            Mark’s gospel is believed to be the first gospel, written about forty years after Jesus’ death.  Its original audience was a group of Christians who were also solidly within the Jewish community.  In their very recent past, like within the last ten years or so, Jews had revolted against Roman rule, only to have Jerusalem sacked and the Temple destroyed.  This community still understood Jesus to be the Messiah, the savior, but they had to rethink what exactly that meant.  Up until then they’d believed that the Messiah was an apocalyptic figure, who would bring about the end of the world as they knew it, overthrow their Roman oppressors, and restore the nation of Israel to her original, political glory.  With the failure of the Jewish revolt, they were beginning to understand that the Messiah brought about salvation in a different way, in a spiritual, transformative way that was rooted in Jesus as the suffering servant described in Isaiah.  So Mark’s gospel was written to help people better understand what kind of Messiah Jesus really was.

            Matthew’s gospel was written about ten years or so after Mark, and the concern for the community then was figuring out the position of the Christian church within Israel.  Christians were still mostly Jews, though on the fringes of Judaism.  Judaism itself was struggling to figure out what its own future would be—either continuing to follow the Torah and wait for the Messiah promised in the Hebrew Scriptures, or else accept that the Messiah had already come as Jesus, and move forward from there.  The first view was winning out.  Matthew’s community was of the latter opinion, and Matthew’s gospel strives to show how Jesus was the fulfillment and embodiment of the Torah, and was thus the future of Judaism.

            Luke’s gospel was written not long after Matthew’s, though for an entirely different audience.  While Matthew wrote for Jewish Christians trying to shape the future of Judaism, Luke was written for a mostly Gentile audience, and it explains how the message of Jesus reached beyond the Jewish community.  This isn’t clear if you just read Luke alone, but it’s important to remember that the gospel of Luke is only the first volume in a two-volume set—the second volume is the book of Acts.  So when you read Luke and Acts together as a single book, the way they’re supposed to be read, you see how what was promised as a Jewish Messiah actually offers a message of hope and salvation to all, regardless of religious or cultural origins.  Jesus’ universality is stressed in Luke-Acts.

            And then we get to John’s gospel.  Written sometime after Luke-Acts, perhaps as many as eighty years after the crucifixion, John’s gospel is different.  Whereas in the first three gospels Jesus is a very human figure, the Jesus shown in John appears considerably more spiritual.  In fact, many scholars call John’s gospel the ‘spiritual’ gospel.  But what is its primary focus?

            Like the other gospels, John shows Jesus as a healer, a teacher, and a miracle worker.  But in John, virtually everything Jesus says and does points to God the Father, and highlights the unique relationship between God the Father and Jesus, Son of God.  Jesus is one with the Father, and makes clear that his Father is Yahweh, the God who created the world, the God who revealed himself to Abraham, to Moses, and who was with the Jewish people throughout their entire existence.  And what the Jesus in John’s gospel does is demonstrate that if you really want to know God, if you really want to know the mind of God and the will of God, then you’ll get to know Jesus, his Son.  All throughout John’s gospel, Jesus makes this point.  Early in the gospel, when the Pharisee Nicodemus comes to him by night, not to trap him but to understand him, Jesus tells him that God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save it.  Next he tells a Samaritan woman of questionable moral standing that he is the Messiah, the bringer of salvation, come to help people worship the Father in spirit and truth.  Later, after healing a lame man on the Sabbath, he declares that the Son can do nothing except what he sees his Father doing, and he sees his Father still working to bring life to the world.  After feeding the five thousand, Jesus points to his Father as the one who not only made that miracle possible, but was also the one responsible for providing manna in the wilderness during their wanderings in the desert so many years ago.  And on and on it continues.

            Throughout the gospel, Jesus emphasizes the relationship he has with the Father, until he dines in the upper room with his disciples on the night in which he was betrayed.  He begins by humbling himself and washing their feet, an act of service, devotion, and love, and then instructs them to follow his example and act according to the same love and humility towards one another.  Then, knowing what will soon happen to him and that he will no longer be physically with his disciples, he begins to prepare them for life after his crucifixion, telling them what they must do and what they can expect.  His disciples are afraid and confused, and ask him many questions which he answers.  And then he prays for them.

            And here is the crux of John’s gospel.  What we have here is a glimpse of a private conversation between two persons of the Trinity, and what they are discussing is us.  After all his instructions to his disciples about what they should do, Jesus, Son of God, speaks directly to his Father about them and makes a request on their behalf.  He doesn’t ask the Father to help them do anything.  All of his instructions he leaves entirely up to his disciples to follow on their own, those in that room and those who believed later through their word, right up to us today.  But his prayer for all his disciples, then and now, is that we get to experience the kind of relationship the Son shares with the Father.

            God is a god of relationship.  God himself is relationship, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  God did not create the world out of a need for completeness; God is complete within himself.  But the love of that relationship was overflowing, and God created the world because that love was too good to keep contained within himself, and he wanted to give his creation the experience of what it is to be truly, fully, and completely loved.  But we’re afraid of that love.  We’re afraid to submit to it, surrender to it, because we’re afraid we may lose ourselves to it.  But the Father did not create us so that we could be lost; he created us to know him, to be in mutual relationship with him.  If you look at the relationship between the Father and the Son in John’s gospel, you see that Jesus is a distinct person, different from the Father, but still working with him in perfect harmony and unity.  And it is that kind of relationship that Jesus is praying that we too can experience.  God is not trying to control us; God is honoring our uniqueness, our particular strengths and weaknesses, and guiding us to live according to our fullest potential.  Unfortunately, we’re not honoring God in the same way.  We are trying to control him, believing in the ‘if-then’ equation.  If we do this, then God must do that.  And when God doesn’t act the way we think he should, then we question his motives, his intent, his goodness, even his very existence.

            And what does God do about that?  He lets us have our doubts, continues to show us the way, and lets us determine how close we’ll let him be.  The Son’s prayer to the Father—that we be one with God and that the love with which the Father loved the Son be in us also—is not for God’s sake or benefit, but for ours.

            Jesus’ last words to the disciples before he began his prayer were, “I have said [these things] to you, so that in me you may have peace.  In the world you face persecution.  But take courage; I have conquered the world!” (John 16:33)  Let us now trust that Christ has indeed already conquered the world, so we don’t have to fight to conquer it ourselves anymore.  Trust the Father, trust the Son, trust the Holy Spirit.  Understand that God loves you for who you are, not for what you do.  Even when we face the trials and the persecutions that Jesus spoke of, we will never be forsaken.  Trust that God will see you through, even if it’s through a door you never saw coming or would have chosen for yourselves.  After all, if the first Christians’ ideas about the Messiah being an apocalyptic figure had been correct, then none of us would be here now.  But they were wrong, and the Spirit worked through Mark to help them adjust to a new reality, and then again through Matthew, and then Luke, and so on.  And God is still working to bring life to the world today.  So let us add our prayers to the prayer of Jesus.  Lord God, let us be one, so that the world may know you and know that you love them, as you love your very own Son.  Amen.