Reflection on the Readings for Easter 7 by Frances Flatman
Today’s Gospel, (John 17:20-26) really is one of those WOW moments, when we are invited into God’s project for his entire creation. People often ask about the discovery of ‘other worlds, out there’ and whether or not they ‘know’ God. Today is also, if your Readings come from the Jerusalem Bible, one of those ‘lost in translation’ moments. Consider the difference between the word ‘world’ in this rendering and the Greek word Kosmos, or as we would have it ‘cosmos’. Do they have the same meaning? I would argue they do not, and following the Greek suddenly opens us up to a much greater appreciation of God’s project in creation as we come to appreciate that his plan encompasses the entire created order, the Milky Way and beyond! A Brian Cox moment!
In our Gospel, when John’s Jesus is in Jerusalem for his passion, he makes this lengthy prayer to the Father about us and our relationship to God as they are. Read properly, it alters our entire focus on ‘salvation’, ‘heaven’ and precisely whose we are and how we come to this state; and as we read it we acknowledge that it is all the work of Christ and has nothing at all to do with our worthiness or lack of it. It remains pure gift, the gift of the one who made the supreme offering of himself to the Father and who now argues for our place in divinity. In the beginning of his Prologue John describes Jesus as The Word, in the singular and he remains this throughout the Gospel, not a collection of wordiness, but God’s entire self articulation, so that when the disciples and we speak of God to others we take on his identity, the outreach of God to humanity. Therefore, in verse 20 the Greek uses the singular; ‘word’ which disciples speak, indicating that their work is not so much about Jesus but is Jesus himself, his embodiment, given to them to give to the cosmos. It’s all quite heady stuff and it’s what Jesus prays the Father we will become.
As the Reading goes on we see why things are as they are, for Jesus continues asking God the Father to recognise the relationship of the two of them, Father and Son one of total unity, knowing and love; a relationship of absolute transparency and openness between them, and then staggeringly asks the Father to include us (grotty and destructive as we can be) in this reciprocal relationship. One Jesus points out existed between Father and Son ‘before the foundation of the cosmos’. If, reading the text you read cosmos for ‘world’ throughout, you will get a much greater sense of what’s going on.’ I have given them the glory you gave to me, that they may be one as we are one.’ Then let this statement quite simply blow you away. ‘Oh Christian’, wrote St Leo, ‘be aware of your divinity.’
In Acts (7:55-60) we find Stephen who has just had his vision of the glory of God and Jesus, which leads the crowd to stone him. He twice describes it all as ‘heaven thrown open’, for he is party to the divine relationship and so offends Jews that they kill him. He has gazed on the forbidden, and opened the door to all of us against those who prefer to keep God firmly locked up in his box and confined in man made terms, and usually negative at that. Jesus knows no boundaries and reaches out eternally and to all. Heaven ‘thrown open’ makes space for us all. All our boundaries are shot away.
Perhaps, for all his really weird imagery, this is what the writer of the Apocalypse (22:12-14.16-17.20.) is about; though I for one find the ideas as expressed here frequently quite ungodlike. His reliance upon our right behaviour sadly puts most of us most of the time completely out of the game. In the end, we must rely on Jesus. ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.’ Perhaps we will do best when we surrender ourselves to this unimaginable task in God, and marvel at the desire God has to include us in his project for the cosmos.
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