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THAT THEY MAY KNOW YOU JOHN 17:1-11 Today Is the Last Sunday of the Season of Easter. This Is a Season in Which the Church Seek

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THAT THEY MAY KNOW YOU JOHN 17:1-11 Today Is the Last Sunday of the Season of Easter. This Is a Season in Which the Church Seek THAT THEY MAY KNOW YOU JOHN 17:1-11 DRANESVILLE UMC SUNDAY, MAY 24, 2020 SEVENTH SUNDAY OF EASTER Today is the last Sunday of the Season of Easter. This is a season in which the Church seeks to understand and explain the significance of the Resurrection. The first few Sundays focused on accounts of Jesus appearing to various persons after he arose. The last three Sundays of the season are focused on helping us understand what Jesus’ resurrection means to the Church now. How and why should we live differently as a result of something that happened almost 2000 years ago? The Gospel Lesson for today is a portion of what has often been called Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer. As the passage begins, the Last Supper has concluded and Jesus is about to lead the disciples from Jerusalem down across the Kidron Valley to the Garden of Gethsemane, where Judas will betray him, resulting in Jesus’ arrest. Before they depart, Jesus offers this prayer to God on behalf of the disciples. Why is this prayer a priestly prayer? Let’s think of priests today. While some ordained clergy are called priests, many clergy perform priestly functions. What might these functions be? A priestly role or function is any action in which the clergy person speaks to God on behalf of the people or speaks to the people on behalf of God. One example is a sermon. This is not simply a lecture. The pastor should study the Scripture to prayerfully discern what God may be saying to the people through the passage. The pastor then prepares and delivers the message he or she has discerned. Obviously, the sermon should fit the context - place, date and time and circumstances. A pastor may also perform a prophetic role by preaching; but that’s for another time. Another priestly function is celebrating Communion. In the Sacrament, the pastor prays to God on behalf of the people and then serves as a conduit for God’s grace through serving the elements. Some of you have performed priestly functions. If you have prayed for someone else, particularly if you have prayed in their presence, that’s a priestly function. During the last service of healing prayer we held, I asked several of you to 1 pray for persons as they came forward seeking healing for themselves or others. Through the prayers you offered you acted as priests. This prayer found in John’s Gospel has also been called The Lord’s Prayer. You may be thinking, “This prayer sounds nothing like The Lord’s Prayer I learned to pray.” You’re absolutely right. The issue is who is praying. If you remember, in Matthew 6, Jesus taught his disciples how to pray using the words we pray every Sunday and many of you pray on other occasions. Roman Catholics often refer to this prayer as the “Our Father.” This is NOT a prayer that Jesus prayed; it’s one he taught the disciples to pray. A more appropriate name for that prayer might be “The Disciples’ Prayer,” but the name “The Lord’s Prayer” has been around too long to change now. The point I am making is the prayer in today’s Gospel Lesson is a prayer Jesus prayed. In fact, it’s the longest prayer by Jesus anywhere in the Gospels. This prayer marks a transition. In the chapters in John preceding this one, Jesus has been teaching, preaching and performing signs or miracles which demonstrate his authority. On several occasions he told others that his “hour” had not come - “hour” being the time for Jesus to be glorified as the Son of God. In the Gospel of John, Jesus glorifies God as he dies on the cross. Notice how the prayer in our lesson begins, “Father, the hour has come.” Jesus knows that death awaits him in a matter of hours. Ever since the first man and woman sinned back in Genesis, Jesus’ death to overcome the curse of sin was inevitable. All of history was leading to this event. Through Jesus’ death and resurrection sin will be defeated, believers may claim the promise of eternal life and God will be glorified. How all of these are related is a great mystery of faith. Eternal life - this may be the greatest hope and possibly the greatest mystery of our faith. Elsewhere in the Gospel of John, Jesus makes it clear that eternal life is a blessing that believers may claim NOW. Eternal life begins when we come to believe in Jesus as our Savior. In verse 3, Jesus speaks of eternal life when he prays, “Now this is eternal life: that they know you [meaning God the Father], the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” This is a slightly different take on eternal life. In this verse, eternal life is linked to knowing, perceiving, recognizing, becoming acquainted with, and understanding 2 God and knowing Jesus as the Christ, the promised Savior. Jesus’ prayer expresses his hope that the world will come to know God through him. Knowing God - That seems to be an impossible goal. How can we know the unknowable? How can we know someone who is so much greater than us, so far beyond our understanding? I wrestled with this concept of knowing God for several days trying to figure out how to describe my understanding in a way that makes sense to me in order to convey it to others. The Greek word ginisko, which is used in this verse, may be translated as either “know” or “understand.” But how can we know or understand God? Let me come at this from the backside. Let’s see what knowing God DOESN’T mean. When Jesus prays about knowing God, I don’t believe he is praying that the disciples or we would simply know ABOUT God. Knowing God is not a matter of acquiring information about God. To do that would entail studying the Bible to simply collect data. What descriptions might we find about God? How does God communicate with people? What does God require or expect from people? Some may foolishly try to use some sort of investigative procedures or scientific method to learn about God. Some of the results of this acquisition of information may be useful, but does it help us to really know God? I don’t think so. At least, not the way Jesus meant it in the prayer. Let’s consider some examples which might help make this distinction between knowing and knowing about a little more clear. There is a big difference between knowing about food and eating it. Persons could die of starvation even though they know all about bread, meats, and other foods. Knowing, in this case, is more than proficiency in some skill or task. Knowing God is not like knowing how to type or play a musical instrument. You or I might know all the historical facts about Jesus, Christianity and other matters of faith and yet remain spiritually dead. There is a positive side to this though. Knowing ABOUT Jesus MAY spark a desire to know Him through actual experience. To do that we need to be open to learn and to experience what it means to know God. 3 Think of persons you would say you know. What does that mean? In what way do you know these people? First of all, I believe there are degrees of knowing people. We may know many people casually; some we may know well; but there are only a few people we know VERY well. Those we know well are probably persons whom we may have known only casually when we first met them. Later, we may have come to know them well before finally coming to know them VERY well. Knowing, as we are considering the term here, implies relationship. Relationships through which we come to know someone VERY well take time to develop, often a long time. There may be many shared experiences. To really know someone usually involves spending time with that person in all types of circumstances. You come to know their likes and dislikes, their little quirks, what pushes their buttons and what makes them truly happy. Many of you have heard preachers and other faith leaders speak of a “personal relationship” with Jesus. While the term can be overused, I think it conveys where we are headed today. We experience Jesus as a presence in much the same way we would have a relationship with any other person. Before going much deeper, let me elaborate on the idea of how this personal relationship might be overused. Occasionally, someone may come to faith and get caught up in the idea of having a personal relationship with Jesus. He or she may refer to Jesus as their best friend. That’s all well and good. The problem comes when that person confuses a personal relationship with a PRIVATE relationship. If they get to the point that everything is about “me and Jesus” to the exclusion of everyone else, as if Jesus is somehow their personal possession that no one else can have, then they’ve taken it too far. The opportunity for a relationship with Jesus is open to everyone. How can we have or develop a relationship like that? For us to know God as revealed in the Person of Jesus means relating to a revelation that happened in human history; to confess this person named Jesus, who was crucified and risen as the Son of God. 4 Knowing God entails obeying his commandments as conveyed by Jesus; especially the commandments to love God and neighbor.
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