For today’s Easter 7 Sunday, read John 17:1-11a. The Old Testament reading is from 1 Samuel 1:21-28, the account of Hannah bringing the young Samuel to serve permanently at the Tabernacle from a very young age. The parallel thought from our gospel reading today is the Son, sent into the world, away from the Father, to serve humankind.
One common point of family dynamics is when mom and dad need to have an adult conversation. It can be about major things or minor things but one thing that they may need to communicate to each other is whether they want the kids to hear the conversation or not. One common experience from the point of view of children is when they get to listen in on the conversation not really meant for their ears. There’s a sense of privilege that you’re allowed to hear what your parents are saying to each other.
That’s the privilege we get today. As children of God we get an insight into the conversation God the Son has out loud to God the Father in His prayer. Today we get to listen in on God’s conversation.
When we think about this interrelationship between the Father and the Son, Jesus in John’s gospel gives us a couple of occasions when He peels back the curtain of the persons of our Godhead intercommunicating. It’s important to remember that Jesus is the God-Man in this conversation, because some of the things He says about or to the Father He does according to His divine nature as the Son of God. So on the one hand you can remember this by emphasis: He’s the GOD-Man.
As we think about our relationship to God, we usually think about how our Father is God on high. Jesus illustrates this in this conversation by the way in which He lifts His eyes to heaven (oddly by doing so that’s emphasizing Jesus’ human nature) and, by doing so, indicates that the relationship between us and God is that He is always on high. He’s always the Creator. This cues us in to how this conversation is a privilege which Jesus, the GOD-Man, lets us in on.
These words also communicate about God the Son and God the Father’s relationship. Here we hear about how the Son is about to come home. He wants to come home. He’s been away for a while. The Father, too, wants His Son home. Any parent whose child has gone or lives farther away understands this acutely. The Father longs for His Son’s return.
A comparison here is when a child has grown up, is taking up the family business and, because the father needs to attend to something else, he sends the child off to accomplish an important task. He would prefer to have his child home by his side always, there safe. But because another matter needs to be accomplished, the son has to go accomplish it. This is where we come in. Sometimes the father has to send the son to straighten out something in the lives of his other children. That’s, of course, what Jesus had to do with us. In our case, it was our mess up that caused the interruption in the father’s and son’s relationship.
But, keep in mind, this Son is now not just God, He’s God-MAN. And the Son cannot come home without doing that glorifying work for which He became man, that work of salvation that was to gain for Him His place of glory, and power over all. Because through this work He made it that He is the only way for fallen humans to reconnect with their far-off Creator.
Or, we should say our on high Creator is seeming far off. Why seeming? Not because He moved so far away, but because we did. In fact we did so far that we banished ourselves from His sight. We made ourselves unholy, unacceptable, unable to be in the very presence of the holy Father. Were we to be in that unveiled presence, it would destroy us. The fear would drive us away in ever escalating unbelief that would only hate God and ourselves more and more as we would see just how unholy we are compared to His presence. That separation only leads to one outcome, separated forever. But that is not what God wanted for us, His creatures.
The Son cannot come home without doing that glorifying work. The Son cannot come home without doing that glorifying, yet nasty work. The goal for Him is the glory but the path He took looks like the exact opposite of glory. This running away on our part and messing up ourselves with unholiness is the cause of the Son’s separation from His Father and that side-by-side glory. But what did the Son do that earned Him all that authority over us again, that authority that we threw off? Instead of being side-by-side with His Father, He came to be side-by-side with us. Not only comfortingly near, but also side-by-side in the depths of separation. This becomes clearer the next day when Jesus was to say these words! “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That outcry with His dying human voice and body as He experienced the eternal separation of His Father makes clear that He went to the depths of hell with all its despair not side-by-side with us, but in our place.
For Jesus it was a fitting “why” question. By it Jesus lets us in on that the seeming far off God in Him, Jesus, wasn’t far off at all, not in His thinking. Here God, both the Father and here in the Son, shows He wasn’t distracted by all the other things adults can be distracted by and seem to be far off to their kids. Think of us as kids in our family homes growing up. Sometimes it didn’t seem like we had the attention of our parents. And sometimes, still, it seems like we don’t have the attention of our Father, but it’s not because He’s not thinking about us, no, in fact, our Creator’s whole purpose has been that He doesn’t want us to think of ourselves merely as any of the other creatures He has made. This is the insight into our God the Father’s and God the Son’s parental conversation in their relationship to us as we hear the God-MAN pray for us His siblings below.
This is the answer to the “why”. That Jesus revealed God’s name, the main message of the Bible, that understanding that the Son’s work reveals the Father’s deep love for us His created children! “They believed that you sent me,” Jesus prays. And what that belief is is eternal life!
This is that spark to life in your heart that you can actually trust this God who created you. That’s what the full meaning of the Son being sent for that nasty work means. So that God can call you not just another creature. Not just another animal. Not just another pet. But that He calls you His sons and daughters. Jesus once said “He who believes, has eternal life.” Has it aleady. Possesses it. This spark of trust which so often seems ready to blow out, especially in those low times in our lives such as the disappointments growing up, the sibling fights and rivalries in which we seemed always to lose out, the times of the loss of our loved ones, a parent, a spouse, a child, which shake our souls to our very foundations, the times when trust between ourselves and those who say they love us is shattered by our sinful selfish behaviors—This spark of trust in our hearts that our relationship with God is not like a cat playing with a mouse only to eventually deal it a death bite, but that God wants us, His sons and daughters back home again. That spark of trust, that spark to life that we still have a relationship with our Maker is what Jesus has accomplished. And it means everything. It means the difference between heaven forever or hell.
John wrote his gospel probably long after his own brother James had been killed with the sword by Herod. As the years went on, you can imagine John missed his brother. Our brother Jesus, you could say, misses us. And we miss Him, whom, oddly enough, we have never seen.
While Jesus is gone, we have to remain. Why? Because of something we don’t know. Jesus ascended back to the Father to take up the full power to control things in this fallen world for thousands of years to come. While there He still has a longing for each of His sons and daughters. But we don’t know who all they are whom the Father gave to Jesus. But we know that each one who comes out of that world is precious to Him and He’ll be gone to heaven until they are all brought in. In the meanwhile you could say He, in a right way, worries about the rest of us still here, the same as in we’re concerned about our kids when they’re far away.
So yes, we miss Him and we pray for Jesus’ to return. But do we understand what it would mean if He came back too soon? Had He come back in the year 1900, not one of us would have been. We could say that, well, then it wouldn’t matter to us. But it mattered to Him! And if it matters to Him, it matters to you. This is why wondering or speculating about what would be if we hadn’t existed is not an act of faith. Such debate is moot, useless to do, because we do exist already, by the grace of God.
In Peter’s first epistle, he calls us Living Stones—part of the temple where God dwells. As much as you love your kids, you also like to have your completed home. To live under your kid’s roof, well, it wouldn’t be yours, just like them living under your roof isn’t like all your stuff is theirs. It’s a complete feeling to have all the things of your house right where you want them. You could say God is that way with us, His temple.
To want Jesus to come back now and deny that “heaven” for others would be like wanting to live in a house with windows missing and part of the roof unfinished. No one wants to live in a house like that. Neither does our God. But He’s not concerned about things. He can make things anytime He wants. No, He wants each of you, living stones there. And He wants every other believer to be there, too.
All this is part of the privilege of listening in on God’s conversation. Like children getting to hear their parents talk to each other, we get to see what’s important to them. And what’s important to them, what’s important to God the Father, what’s important to God the Son is … US!