Passage Appointed: John 17:6-19

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This Sunday’s passage from John’s Gospel is part of a prayer that Jesus offers on behalf of his disciples before his departure from them — marking the end of the post-resurrection appearances of the Christ to his followers.   Against the back-drop of this Sunday’s gospel is the fact that this past Thursday was Ascension Day, dedicated to the idea that the Risen Christ “ascended into heaven” and was then seen no more.

In many ways, Ascension Day is an unfortunate detail in the liturgical calendar.    On it’s surface, the story of the Ascension of the Christ summons up images of Jesus floating up in the air and disappearing in the clouds and the disciples stand there looking up, astounded.   It is the kind of story that so many people point to when they want to suggest that religion in general, or Christianity in particular, is silly.    When that kind of literalism is applied to the Ascension, then we miss a profound truth to which this story is attempting to point.  

Speaking of what the Ascension represents, Richard Rohr says, “Jesus is set as the human blueprint, the standard in the sky, the oh-so-hopeful pattern of divine transformation.”   In other words, the Ascension is about the universality of that which Christians call the Christ — the blueprint according to which our humanity is transformed by the realization of the divine.   Jesus as the Christ represents the interpenetration of the divine and the human, making it clear that these are two sides of the same coin of personhood.    The Ascension seeks to make the point that the Christ realized in Jesus is universally available to all, the pattern of transformation into which every human being is invited to enter to become the fullness of who each of us is meant to be.    The universality of this pattern is attested to by all the religious and spiritual traditions of the world in their authentic forms.   While Christians refer to this pattern as the Christ, other traditions would call it by other names.   

This Sunday’s passage from John pairs neatly with this idea, for in this final prayer of the Risen Christ the overwhelming theme is that of oneness.   The oneness of the human and the divine, the oneness of the body of Christ.   The words of the prayer are dense — it is unlikely that Jesus uttered it.  As is often the case in John’s gospel, words of Jesus echoed no where else in the four gospels are used to bring alive a deeper, more profound meditation on the meaning of the Christ Event.     In this prayer, John through Jesus speaks eloquently of mutual giving and receiving, of that which is God’s being given to the Christ and, in turn, to those who follow the Christ.   “All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them…. [P]rotect them…so that they may be one, as we are one.”      Here, at the very end of the Jesus story, comes a profound moment of unity when everything — heaven/earth, divine/human — is seen as One.

One of the great sadnesses of the world is the way in which religious people have a tendency to cling to the particularity of their tradition, to insist that their particular religion (or there particular version of a religion) is uniquely true and that, therefore, all others are false.    Such clinging is a sure sign that the spiritual formation that should happen in every religious tradition stalls at a critical point.

The truth to which the Ascension points, and the profound words of this passage from John, tell us that the ultimate goal of the spiritual journey is to surrender one’s clinging to any particular religious form in order to appreciate the universal truths to which every religious tradition, when understood and practiced authentically, points:  to the way in which the human and the divine are intertwined in the mystery of existence.    No tradition owns the truth of this or possesses the only key to this.   It is common to the experience of being human.   The religious and spiritual traditions of the world are meant to open us up to the depth of this experience, to awaken us to it, and draw us into a place of awe and wonder that brings us together rather than keeping us apart.    

But almost every religious tradition ultimately becomes encased in institutional garb in order to perpetuate and preserve itself.   And in the process, it ends up making followers who are often more loyal to the institution than to the truth the institution seeks to preserve, foster, and make known.     The same thing is mirrored in our own human journey:  to develop properly, we humans must develop strong egos.   And to grow into our human/divine potential, we must then deconstruct those egos.   Religions must do the same.

It’s tricky.  It’s hard.  And that’s why so many people — and institutions — do not do it successfully.

But in this Ascension season, we can pause for a moment and reflect on the universality of the divine/human experience to which religion points.    And in remembering that universality, perhaps we can be moved a little bit out of ourselves and of our clinging and see all around us that we are all on the same journey, meant to be simply “walking each other home,” to quote Ram Dass.