Reflection by Frances Flatman on next Sunday's Readings (21st May 2023)
Most of us who have lost a loved person, either through death or because they have parted from us as refugees or moved far away, are left with a sense of loss, of sadness and of unfinished business. An inevitable part of grief and mourning frequently manifests itself in anger, and gradually we learn to cope without the loved person. But this is not the situation with the disciples, for in all our Readings the preparation they received from Jesus, and subsequent events, show their expectations, actions and beliefs in a very different light ,and a positive one at that.
In our Reading from Acts (1:12-14), having experienced the resurrection in Luke’s gospel and the Ascension of the Lord, we meet them changed from the despondent group who witnessed the crucifixion, and of course their own fearful behaviour in which they all ran away. The resurrection of the Lord, and his brief time with them in the risen flesh before his final departure, was clearly a time of growth and revitalization, as, filled with new heart, belief and energy they can begin to form the Christian communities. Significantly here we are given their names in the pairs they were sent out as witnesses to Jesus during his earthly lifetime after the pattern of Matthew 10 and its variant in Luke 10. Our text in Acts has them all focussed together in prayer. The Greek uses the phrase ‘devoted to prayer’ indicating that this was the means by which they kept their links with the risen, ascended Lord and gained their commitment and understanding of the kinds of communities they needed to establish, focussed in the life of Jesus through the power of the Spirit.
As we continue our Readings from John’s Gospel (Jn 17:1-11) we get an insight into what that meant, as the disciples came to understand Jesus after his resurrection, and they recalled his understanding whilst still with them of what the new life they were given, ‘in’ Jesus’ own relationship with God the Father and with and ‘in’ us. John’s very elevated language, so unlike the synoptic Jesus ,and clearly the work of his long life and meditation on the Lord’s person and life, not to mention the conversations he would have had with Jesus as a teenager, growing up with Christ and ultimately the only survivor of the apostolic group, show us once again a transformed community. We have to remember that by the time John wrote his Gospel in the 80’s CE his colleagues would have been long dead, and it was John’s mission and delight to speak of his understanding of Jesus in a very different way than had Mark, Matthew and Luke. I suspect he could do this since he was known as ‘The Beloved Disciple’, someone especially close to Jesus and at an impressionable age, from his teens. So we see how a human being unpacks Jesus for us.
It is from this perspective that John wrote his memories of Jesus, and his recall that this teaching from Jesus had been given them just before his betrayal and arrest. Jesus speaks not of this mortal life, but of ‘eternal life’, a life, an existence with God the Father that takes Jesus and therefore his earthly companions into a wholly new mode of being. Jesus speaks to God the Father as one he knows through and through, telling him that his earthly life is coming to its close as he has achieved all the Father commissioned him in love to do. By this time Jesus speaks to the Father as one with himself, ‘So that your Son may glorify you; and, through the power over all mankind that you have given him, let him give eternal life to all those you have given him.’ Clearly this was a link that human death could not break, it was a link made and bonded together through the quality of their ‘knowing’; awareness of who and what Jesus was through his acts and teaching, and through the remarkable story of their lives for those three short years. Throughout, John speaks of ‘glory’, the glorification of Jesus by God the Father, and in that process of their mutual glorification the faithful disciples will receive all that the Father promised. Jesus emphasises this unification and belonging in God by repeats of phrases about the disciples, like, ‘I have made your name known to the men you took from the world to give to me. They were yours and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word.’….. ‘I am not praying for the world but for those you have given me, because they belong to you.’…. ‘In them I am glorified.’
So God’s glory, and Christ’s glory, resides in the disciples! Now as we all know that the disciples were not known for their wisdom or their courage or their sticking power, it appears from all this that John has understood that the disciples, and we too, are God’s gift to the world; and that it is not through our abilities that we are chosen to share his/their glory, but precisely because of their choice and ultimately the remarkable witness of the disciples, glorified in their deaths after the pattern of Jesus’ death; apart that is from John whose task it was to reveal God in Christ to the world. It’s not so much about us but God’s work in us. God sees and finds potential in the most unpromising of people, the bad tempered, the worldly, and martyrs just in the wrong place.
This is what 1 Peter (4:13-16) is all about, as the writer living some 40 odd years after the death of St Peter, writes to bolster the faith and courage of Bithynian Christians around the turn of the century. Suffering for being a Christian, after the pattern of Christ, it will be their glorification, the evidence that they have truly followed Jesus and given themselves over to him as he did to the Father. It was not because the martyrs there were more smart, more holy or of better witness, they would have been ordinary men and women who followed Christ and were punished because of it. The writer goes to great lengths to remind the recipients of the Letter, to ensure their faithfulness which distinguished them from criminals – who deserved punishment - and especially mentions ‘informers’, spies in other words, who betrayed fellow Christians to the authorities as we know was the case in Bithynia. It’s a significant mention, and one we too need to beware, lest we betray our fellow Christians by our behaviour. We are not called to spectacular feats of intellect – well not often; nor mostly other moments of outstanding bravery. but our witness to Christ is critical and we must make it if necessary.
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