John 17 20 thru 26

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“Perfectly One,” John 17:20-26 (Second Sunday in Lent, February 25, 2018) “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, 21 that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, 23 I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. 24 Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. 25 O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me. 26 I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” PRAY Today we will finish up our Sunday morning study on John 17, which is Jesus’ high priestly prayer. It’s the longest recorded prayer of Jesus in the Bible, and what makes it most notable is that he prays it on the night before his death. If you know you’re doing to die in less than twenty-four hours, you make your words count. On the night before your death, you don’t make small talk. You don’t just talk about the weather. You’re going to talk about what matters, the burden of your heart. So what is it that’s closest to the heart of Jesus? It’s Christian unity. That’s the subject of his prayer. Verse 20-21a: “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, 21 that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you …” Jesus prays something similar in verses 22 and 23. The unity of the church – that’s the most pressing matter in Jesus’ mind. It seems we talk about unity a lot today. We talk about our country being divided and we wish it were more united. Every coach wants their team to be united, and to play as one and not selfishly, so they will win. Business owners want their employees to be united, so they can make money. But what does Christian unity look like? Does it mean we dress alike? Or we must look alike? Or act, or think, or vote alike? Do we all have to read from the same version of the Bible or send our children only to the same schools? No – when people gather together and insist that everyone in the group doing all of those things just alike, you have a cult not Christianity. And just as importantly: why does unity matter? Why does Jesus care? Verse 22 is central to answering that question: “The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one …” This verse says you can’t have Christian unity unless you first have this glory. We must understand this glory before we can understand unity. Three points: first, what the glory is. Second, where it leads. Third, what happens when we have it. First, what is this glory? Typically when we think of something with glory we think of something bright, shiny, impressive, full of physical beauty – like a glorious sunset or some work

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of art. We might even speak of a gloriously beautiful woman. But that can’t be what Jesus is talking about here in verse 22. Why? Because he says that whatever this glory is, he’s already given it to his disciples. And whatever else you can say about the disciples you can be sure they were a ragtag bunch. In the eyes of their society, they were nothing special. Mostly they were fisherman. Nothing wrong with that but you wouldn’t have said fishermen were glorious. They were uneducated, they were poor or nearly poor. Nothing in the New Testament indicates there was anything impressive about them spiritually, intellectually, or physically. In just a few hours, when the guards come to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, the disciples run for their lives. To a man they desert Jesus. That’s certainly not glorious – that’s shameful behavior. Then read the rest of the New Testament. Were the disciples ever considered glorious at any point the rest of their lives? No – they were persecuted, they were on the run from the authorities. The apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 11 gives this laundry list of woes he’s been through over the years: he’d been whipped five times and beaten with rods three. One time his adversaries tried to stone him to death. Three times he was shipwrecked. He was always on the move, constantly in danger, going without sleep and food and water and sometimes, we read, even going without clothes. So if the disciples weren’t glorious in the way we typically think of it, then what is this glory that they already have? Look back at John 17:1b: “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you …” In John’s gospel, the “hour” always refers to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. To be crucified in the ancient world was to experience the most shameful, disgraceful method of death the world had yet devised. The world saw the cross, and it saw shame. But Jesus saw the cross, and he saw his glory. How? We are all sinners. We are born into a broken world, a world broken by sin, where things don’t work right and people don’t work right. And then we add to the brokenness by our own sin. We are, as the old book of common prayer puts it, “miserable offenders.” Since God made the world good, when we sin he is offended. But on the cross Jesus overlooked our offenses, and it was to his glory. Proverbs 19:11 says, “Good sense makes one slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook an offense.” Have you ever seen someone do that – have you ever witnessed one person wronged by someone else, and that first person refused to get all upset about it? Refused to pay them back? Not because they were scared to but just because they didn’t want to make the situation worse? If you have seen that, then you had to walk away impressed. That refusal to payback was to that person’s glory. Now think of the kind of character Jesus must have had on the cross in order to overlook not just the sins one or two people committed against him, but to overlook the sins of the world? And on the cross Jesus didn’t only overlook our offenses, he paid for them. Our wrongdoing demands punishment. Justice demands it. It’s only right. The world would be unlivable if evil was countenanced. But on the cross Jesus absorbed, he bore, the pain of the punishment we deserve.

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So, finally we get to the question: what is this glory Jesus has already given the disciples? The answer: the ability to bear the pain other people deserve. If you call yourself a Christian, then Jesus has given you a job. We are the spiritual descendants of the disciples. He’s our Lord too. But what is the job he has given us? Often we tend to think it’s something grand like to fix the world or, at least, to fix the people around us. But we can’t do that. You cannot change anyone, nor can I. Christians often forget this, and it makes our lives harder than they need to be. Some of us kill ourselves trying to change people, but we would be spared so much disappointment if we remembered that’s not our job. Instead, what we are called to do is enter into relationships with the people around us, and make sure that above all else we bear more pain than we inflict. Go into the workplace, go into your school, and certainly reach out to those closest to you – your friends, parents, your children, your spouse – and bear more pain than you inflict. That may not sound like an ambitious or spiritual enough of a philosophy to some of you but I assure you it is. All the people around you are hurting. Their hearts are broken by their own sin or the sin in the world. But when you refuse to ignore their pain or pay them back when they hurt you, when you willingly suffer to maintain the relationship with them, it’s to your glory. That’s the job Jesus has given Christians. For example, when someone lashes out at you in anger, whether it’s your fault or not, that hurts. No one enjoys that. But when you suffer willingly and refuse to pay them back and when you bear that pain, Jesus says that’s to your glory. Or say you have a friend who is totally absorbed in their own problems and thoughts and every time you get together they basically ignore you and only talk about themselves. That hurts, that’s not enjoyable. No one wants to put up with that. But when you don’t ignore them or screen their calls and instead bear that pain and stay in the relationship, Jesus says that’s to your glory. Some of you know people who all they ever seem to want to do with you is use you – use you to get ahead, use your money, use your influence. Every time they call they want something. Maybe you own a pickup truck and trailer, and there are a few people who only ever call you when they need to borrow them. But no one likes being used. It hurts. But when we bear that pain and stay in the relationship Jesus says, “This is to your glory.” 1 Peter 4:12-13: “12 Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. 13 But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed.” This ability to suffer doesn’t mean you can’t say to someone, “It feels like you’re using me. Stop it,” or “You realize you have a problem with anger, don’t you?” You can’t have relationships with people if you aren’t willing to be honest with them. You must have boundaries. You must take care of yourself and you get rest from difficult people. But it does mean you refuse to cut people off completely and refuse to bring any more unnecessary pain into the world, while you bear what you can.

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At this point I can imagine two responses. The first one is, “That sounds really, really hard.” The second one is, “And how exactly is living like this glorious? Because it doesn’t sound glorious to me.” The first response explains the second. Yes, this is hard. It’s incredibly hard. But that’s what makes it so glorious. We only give hard jobs to people who are really good at them. I used to be an attorney – I only practiced for a few years. When a client had an easy, simply issue, they could see me. But when they had a difficult legal matter and they came to our firm, they did not knock on my door. They went down the hall to one of the corner offices, and in the corner offices, the biggest offices, sat the most experienced, most seasoned litigators. It was a testament to the glory of their legal experience and training that they got those cases. When people come to you with hard things, it’s to your glory. So when God comes to you with suffering, he’s not punishing you– he is honoring you. He’s saying, “I know it’s hard, but I wouldn’t come to you unless you could do this. I’m giving you this to honor you.” Paul in Philippians 3:10 says, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death …” (NIV 1984). When Helen Roseveare first became a Christian the man who led her to Christ gave her a Bible and wrote that verse in it. Helen grew up in England and beginning in 1953 she served as a medical missionary in what was then called the Belgian Congo. That was a tumultuous time in Africa. The nations on that continent were leaving behind their colonial pasts and fighting for independence, and soon Congo was in the midst of a civil war. Hundreds of missionaries and thousands of Africans died in the fighting. And in the summer of 1964, the hospital where Helen worked was captured by rebels and over that summer she was beaten and raped repeatedly. On the day all this suffering began, as everything fell apart at the hospital and Helen was bring carried by the soldiers into her house for it to happen, she later said that she began to pray and cry out, “God, where are you? Why are you letting this happen to me?” And she’s very clear that she did not hear a voice, but she felt in a powerful way the presence of God and she felt God say, “Helen, can you thank me?” She thought, “No, this is too much. This has gone too far. I thought I could trust you.” But then she felt him saying, “‘Can you thank me for trusting you? Can you thank me for trusting you with this experience even if I never tell you why?’ Even in the midst of the darkness (I had only a split-[second] to think about it), I thought, ‘Dear Lord, I don’t know what you’re saying, I don’t know why you’re saying it, I don’t know who will ever be blessed by this, but if this is part of your plan yes, thank you for trusting me.’ And immediately I was flooded with the sense of the enormous peace of God. It was wonderful. It was as though God said, ‘All I want of you is the loan of your body.’ And it was Jesus in me – they weren’t fighting me, they were fighting Jesus. All I had to do was say, ‘Yes, Jesus, I’m yours, you’re in me. Just as you want.’ It didn’t stop the pain, the humiliation, the cruelty, it didn’t take that away, but suddenly it was with Him and for Him… It was really as if God wrote one word, it was as if I could read it in the sky, ‘Privilege’”: the privilege of sharing in Christ’s sufferings. She was able to forgive the men even as they were attacking her. That’s an extreme case, but it’s an example of the glory Jesus has given his church.

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Second, where does this glory lead us? In John 17:24, Jesus prays, “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.” Here Jesus uses the word “glory” in the more traditional way, to refer to the splendor, the honor, the majesty that was his before his incarnation, when he dwelt in heaven with the Father before the creation of the world. Jesus tells us that when our glory on earth is our ability to suffer for the sake of loving others, it will inevitably lead us to one day see the glory of Jesus Christ in heaven. That’s a big deal. There are some books I’ve read that have profoundly changed my life. There literally is a J.D. who existed before he read a certain book, and the J.D. who emerged from reading that book. What happened? The book was so good, so glorious, it changed me. I wasn’t the same after reading it. Jesus Christ, however, is so glorious, his glory is so far and infinitely beyond any other kind of glory in the universe, that just to look upon him in heaven will not just change you but perfect you. That’s 1 John 3:2 – when Jesus appears we shall be transformed for we shall see him as he is. In 2 Corinthians 4 the apostle Paul writes about all the suffering he’s done for the cause of the gospel. He’s been crushed and persecuted and struck down. And then he says this: “11 For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. 12 So death is at work in us, but life in you.” Paul is going into the world bearing more pain [that’s the death at work in him] than he inflicts [that’s the life in others]. And he sums up the chapter like this: “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. 17 For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison …” 2 Corinthians 4:11-12, 16-17. The glory of Paul’s suffering is prepares him to behold Jesus’ glory, and when that happens all will be well. Nothing else will matter once you’ve seen his glory. I love Don Carson’s book Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor. It’s a book about his dad, Tom Carson, who died about twenty-five years ago, and who was a small church pastor in heavilyRoman Catholic Quebec in the 1950s, 1960s. That was a hard time and place to be a Protestant pastor. This was before Vatican II, and the people were hostile to the gospel he preached. Baptist minister were sent to jail for preaching back then. So few people came to faith during Tom’s ministry. Many in his community were very unkind, especially to his children. But he was faithful, he loved the people God gave him, he loved his neighbors patiently, he refused to be bitter about it. The end of the book is about Tom’s death, and because he was an ordinary pastor and because of a snafu at the hospital he died all alone. We read, “When he died, there were no crowds outside the hospital, no editorial comments in the papers, no announcements on television … no attention paid by the nation… There was only the quiet hiss of oxygen, vainly venting because he had stopped breathing and would never need it again.” There was no glory in his death. “But on the other side all the trumpets sounded. Dad won entrance to the only throne that matters, not because he was a good man or a great man – he was, after all, a most ordinary pastor

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– but because he was a forgiven man. And he heard the voice of him whom he longed to hear say, “Well done, my good and faithful servant; enter into the joy of your Lord.” After decades of suffering for the gospel to his glory, Tom finally experienced the glory of Christ. That’s where the glory leads. Third, what happens when we have this glory? Now that we understand the glory we can finally talk about unity. As a Christian minister I used to see all the disorganization and division among Christian churches and denominations and get depressed. I’d say, “We are so far from anything approaching unity. We will never have unity.” But now I think that’s part of God’s plan. We sing songs like “Onward Christian Soldiers” and think we should march into the world like a big army, but if we did we’d be so tempted to pride and self-sufficiency that we’d never be able to love the world. We’d just despise it because we’d think we are so much better than the world. This is how I think about unity now. On the cross, Jesus Christ went to war with sin and pain and destruction and won. The war is over, and Jesus has triumphed. The enemy is defeated. That’s Colossians 2. The church of Jesus Christ is now engaged in a mopping up operation. The devil and his angels have been crushed by Jesus and scattered all over the world, and our job until Jesus comes again is to clean up what’s left. So you can think of the church as millions of little special forces units going into the pockets of hurt that remain (and there still are so many) to finish the job that Jesus started on the cross of absorbing and bearing the pain of the world and testifying about Jesus. You may think, “Special forces? I don’t think of myself like that.” You should, because you have the glory. In the military, it is glorious to be an Army Ranger or a Navy Seal. Not everyone can do that. In the same way, to be a Christian you have the glorious power to go into the pockets of pain and absorb the suffering of the world. When the world sees us do that they will notice. John 17:22-23: “The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one,23 I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one [there’s the unity], so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.” This is why unity was on Jesus’ lips hours before he died. When the world sees people who don’t dress alike or look alike or think alike or vote alike or send their kids to the same schools, when the world see people from different backgrounds and different churches and different politics and different races and income levels, people who should hate each other, instead united in their determination to bear more pain than they inflict, then they begin to believe the gospel of Jesus Christ. They have to! The world only knows one law: eye for an eye, retribution. But when the world sees people who should be divided instead united for the purpose of suffering for others and pointing them to Jesus, it shocks them and gets them to the point where they can believe in Jesus, too. Christianity is a missionary religion. We are called to preach the gospel to others. But if you want the world to know Jesus Christ, we must not only tell them the gospel we must show them the gospel. We must be ready to suffer. But when we do while pointing people to Jesus, they will be saved. So let’s pray that this glory would be our glory, that we would delight in the mission we’ve been given, so the world will know that Jesus is the Son of God. AMEN

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