Unsurprisingly this Sunday, we are still in this portion of John’s Gospel scholars call “The Farewell Discourse” – Jesus’s last instructions to the disciples before his passion, death and Resurrection. As I mentioned before, it’s a long discourse, almost four chapters and it may sound a bit repetitive…Yet if you pay attention, you will realize that the Farewell Discourse is a bit like a spiral, slowly folding us in and dragging us closer to the center, drawing us closer to the point. And I guess this is where we land today – to the center, to the heart of Jesus’s will for his disciples, to the heart of Jesus’s heart.
If you remember from last week and the week before that, we have been learning about what Jesus has to say to his disciples before he leaves them:
– The first thing Jesus asks his disciples to do is to abide in his love. He does not ask them to save the world, or to build a church or to go on a mission. He asks them to receive the Father’s love through him, him being the vine, the Father being the vine grower and the disciples being the branches.
– The second thing Jesus asks his disciples is to love one another, and if you remember from last week, Jesus asks his disciples to love with a certain kind of love: The love of God Jesus himself has given testimony to by laying down his life. The disciples are called to lay down their lives for one another, to give the love they have received, an unselfish love that seeks the best for others.
Those two commandments Jesus gives to his disciples in the Farewell Discourse are of course pretty close to all of his teachings as we found them throughout the Gospel: Love God with all you heart, all your mind and all your soul, and love your neighbor as yourself.
And so now you would expect that we are going to wrap it up – and yet, there is more, and this is what we discover in the passage we have heard today. As I have just noticed, today we are drawn to the center of Jesus’s will, to Jesus’s desire – a desire so deep that actually Jesus doesn’t speak these words to the disciples, those words are addressed to the Father, in what the scholars call “The Final Prayer” – the climax of the Farewell discourse. And so it’s wonderful because as Jesus addresses the Father, we get a peak into Jesus’s heart and we learn about Jesus’s secret agenda for his disciples:
Yes, Jesus wants the disciples to receive the love of God and he wants them to love one another, but in the end he wants them to be sanctified. Jesus wants his disciples to be sanctified by “knowing / experiencing the truth”
And well, I was wondering how we react to that exactly? How do we react to that? If Jesus wants his disciples to be sanctified, I guess this is still true for us today – Jesus wants us to have the love of God, to have love for our neighbors and Jesus wants us to be sanctified. Well, I don’t know about you but I am fine with receiving God’s love, loving God and loving neighbor, but I have mixed feelings about sanctification – and I guess I am not alone in that, and for two reasons:
– The first reason why I don’t really like to think about sanctification is that it automatically makes me think about the “holier than thou” issue that is so common place for Christians. Thinking that God’s will is to sanctify myself raises a lot of questions in my mind, the main one being: Isn’t it at odd with Christian’s humility? Am I supposed to believe that I am better than others? Moreover, aren’t we supposed to interact with each others as equal? We want to be welcoming and non judgmental and inclusive Christians, right?
(Now the second reason why I don’t really like to think about sanctification is that it does not sound like a lot of fun. But I’ll come back to it.)
It is a legitimate concern for us to wonder what it means for us Christians to be sanctified – and if it means that we have to establish an “us” versus “them”, if we are to cut ourselves from the world. Throughout the ages, certainly, a lot of Christians have thought this is what they needed to do in order to become holy. Some have lived as Hermits, some in monasteries, some have even created their own cults and sects to feel closer to God, to reach a purer degree of living and not be contaminated with what we used to call “the century” – the society of men, the world.
Now, it’s interesting to realize that John struggled with this question as well. In his Gospel, John mentions the “world” 78 times (11 times in our passage) and “the world” is almost always in opposition with God – The world does not know God or refuses to receive Jesus.
Yet one of the things that is remarkable in our passage today, is to notice that Jesus’s will – and he expresses that very clearly – Jesus’s will is not for his disciples to be cut off from the world. Jesus only asks God to protect them from the evil as long as they are in the world. Which makes me think that the “world” in John’s way of speaking is not so much a physical space, the space that is not the church, it’s not even a social entity, that we could oppose to the Christian community, rather it is the spiritual realm, or if you prefer the mind orientation, where we are not connected to God, where our view is limited to earthly concern – it is if you will the mundane (mundane having its etymological root in “world”). Jesus does not wish for his disciples to hide away from human society or to distance themselves from the sinners (all his ministry was about welcoming the sinners), but Jesus prays for his disciples that they will be protected by God from what is evil, and it sounds like what is evil is to get caught in the “worldly”, where the world becomes the ultimate horizon and one loses sight of God.
We’re fine being in the world – really. What Jesus fears for his disciples is that they will lose sight of God when they’re in it. And we know there are many ways that can happen: We can fall in love too much with this world, wanting the good, earthly things it can provide: wealth, success, entertainment. But it can also happen that we lose sight of God if we are too angry with this world too. We are overwhelmed with its pain, or maybe with its absurdity, and we lose hope, or we just end up being terrified. What Jesus wants for his disciples is that they will be able to live in the world while not losing sight of God – and this is what I think is meant by being sanctified.
Throughout the ages, we have often imagined sanctification as a solitary endeavor of becoming perfect. But in John’s Gospel, it looks like being a Saint does not mean to be perfect, to think all the right things and to do all the good things – being a Saint means to know the Truth, that is the love of the Father – a living truth and not an “intellectual truth”. Being a Saint means to bring into the world a wider perspective and to live into the world with a bigger heart because of this hope and this love we have received from the Father in Jesus (And this is the testimony John talks about in his first letter we have just read)
Jesus says that this deep, intimate knowledge of God and of being united to God will bring us joy, perfect joy – a joy that we can’t keep to ourselves, a joy that we have to share with the world. And this is why sanctification is probably more fun that what we thought it would be.
Being a Saint isn’t about ourselves and our ability to become perfect, or even good. Being a Saint means to be filled with a holy Spirit – generous, daring and resilient – the Holy Spirit, the very Spirit of God inside of us. But about that, we’ll talk next week for the feast of Pentecost.