“The Gift of Ministry”
John 17:6-19
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
5/17/15
In the Gospel
of John, there is no Last Supper scene, at least no final Passover. At the
beginning of chapter 13, Jesus and the twelve do eat together for the last time
before Friday, but it is just Thursday night supper. In John the memorable
ritual is foot washing. Afterward, Jesus launches into 4½ more chapters of
discourse and prayer for his disciples.
The prayer in
today’s reading from John 17 reminds me of last week’s text from 1 John 5. It
seems to go around and around, saying the same things. Then again, what I hear
Jesus trying to tell the disciples is something that cannot be laid out all neat
and tidy. John is painting a picture of Jesus handing off his ministry to his
followers.1 And this handoff entails far more than passing along a
notebook of minutes and a set of keys. Jesus is handing off responsibility for
proclaiming, revealing, and consciously inhabiting and enjoying the kingdom of
God in and for the world. And he is bequeathing this job to eleven guys who
seem to want to intend to appear to understand and trust, but whose responses expose
their sad sack confusion and half-hearted courage.
And therein
lies the dramatic grace of Jesus.
Even as he
faces death, Jesus lives in a freedom that no bold declaration of liberty and
no national constitution can conceive, much less promise. He lives in the realm
of holy communion with the creation. His native habitat is a plane of
consciousness that sees through all the pretense of vanity, all the numbing
layers of worldly loyalties, and all the blinding and asphyxiating smoke of
fear.
As Jesus sits at the table with his
disciples, worldly power has him in the cross hairs. He feels that sinister eye
watching, yet he sees clearly and breathes deeply into the moment. His upcoming
ordeal will be excruciatingly real. His disciples have just about accepted that
their Messiah will disappoint them militarily, so on the fight-or-flight
continuum all but Peter have one foot out the door. And Peter’s lone attempt at
a preemptive strike will expose his own lack of resolve. He will slice off an
ear, but not from an armed soldier, and not from some religiously significant
Pharisee, but from a by-standing slave named Malchus.
This is a rather stomach-turning
example of John’s famous irony. When Peter cuts off the slave’s ear, Jesus’
calm response says, in effect, ‘Peter, bless your heart. Why in God’s name did
you lop off this man’s ear? It’s you who hasn’t heard a word I’ve said!’
Come what may on Friday and
Saturday, Jesus maintains his sacred vision. He still views the creation
through the lens of God-revealing mystery. Regardless of events around him,
God’s Christ continues to follow and to announce the radical freedom of
wide-armed, agape Love. He continues to regard and engage every person he
encounters as God-imaged creatures
This
is the ministry Jesus is leaving to his sleepy followers.
Last week I read
a description of Love that made me feel as if I had learned a wonderful new
word. The author is Canadian Catholic philosopher Jean Vanier. Vanier’s opus is
L’Arche, a global alliance of communities for people with disabilities.2
I imagine that many folks would say that it takes a “special person” to live
and work with the residents of a L’Arche community. I also suspect that Jean
Vanier would say that what it takes is Love.
“Communion,”
writes Vanier, “means accepting people just as they are, with all of their
limits and inner pain, but also with their gifts and their beauty and their
capacity to grow: to see the beauty inside all of the pain. To love someone is
not first of all to do things for
them, but to reveal to them their beauty and value, to say to them through our
attitude: ‘You are beautiful. You are important. I trust you. You can trust
yourself.” We all know well,” says Vanier, ‘that we can do things for others
and in the process crush them, making them feel that they are incapable of
doing things for themselves. To love someone is to reveal to them their
capacities for life, the light that is shining in them.”3
Those words
are becoming yeast rising in the dough of my heart. I don’t know where they
will lead, but only in the freedom of Love can I embrace and follow the often
painful transformations of Love. This is the ministry with which I wish to be
associated, and toward which I wish to lead any church that calls me Pastor.
When praying
for his disciples, Jesus says, “I have given them your word...they do not
belong to the world.”
You are free, he is saying to his disciples.
You are free to see every human being, every inch of the creation as a place
teeming with God light.
This is
difficult for us because the world
enslaves us to attitudes so competitive that they become predatory. Humankind
seems to have bought the lie that the smartest and most trustworthy opinions
belong to those who can criticize their foes with the loudest contempt. In the
public square talking heads have
given themselves over to scream-fests
of insults and disrespect. Liberal and conservative commentators point at each
other and shout, ‘Crucify him!’ Then
they smile and say, ‘Now, a word from our sponsor.’
In the religious square, theology
and piety are littered with phrases like, “all that God does for us” and “all
that God gives to us.” When we associate God’s Love of us primarily with things God does
for us and gives to us, our faith
practice turns into an economic scramble for scarce resources and political
grabs for power. So even conversations among the people of God begin to sound
like prison riots.
Is there any wonder that fewer and
fewer people identify with any spiritual tradition? Focusing on what we get as evidence of God’s Love has
distracted us from the most dauntingly gracious gift from God: Our call to give. Our call to do the ministry of Jesus Christ.
We are not celebrating the
sacrament of the Lord’s Supper today, but we are having communion. In just a
few moments we will gather for lunch in the fellowship hall. As always, I urge
you to sit with someone whose story you don’t know as well. Look into each
other’s eyes, listen deeply into each other’s words. Allow yourself to be someone
through whom God Loves them, someone through whom God reveals to them their own
stunning beauty. They, in turn, will be ones through whom God may reveal
something bright and new about you.
Friends, this
is ministry. This is sanctification. This is Heaven on earth. This is true
freedom.
This
is salvation!
1George W. Ramsey, “Exegetical Perspective” in Feasting
on the Word. Westminster John Knox Press, Westminster/John Knox Press, 2008,
p. 545.
2http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Vanier
3This quotation appears in
Vanier’s book, From Brokenness to Community. I found it online at: http://john13verse34.blogspot.com/2012/09/divisions-in-church-and-need-for.html
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