Meditation 

Sermon          Seventh Sunday of Easter        May 17th, 2026

Good Morning!       Here’s today’s overview:

In these days between Ascension and Pentecost, we gather with the disciples in the upper room, waiting for the Spirit to transform the church around the world. In today’s gospel Jesus prays for his followers and for their mission in his name. Amid religious, social, and economic divisions, we seek the unity that Jesus had with his Father. Made one in baptism, we go forth to live our faith in the world, eager for the unity that God intends for the whole human family.

Some Christians celebrated Jesus’ Ascension this past Wednesday.  Days such as these are given special focus, often during the week.  Because most churches do NOT have services that day, our Lectionary keeps going down Jesus’ path until Pentecost.  In the Gospel of John, Jesus’ ascension is first explicitly mentioned in John 20:17.

Our Gospel reading happened before that, and is Jesus’ prayer, coming near the end of his lengthy Farewell to his disciples (13:31–17:26) in the Gospel of John.  While Jesus teaches simplicity when he speaks about and models prayer in Matthew 6, this prayer is full of theological symbols, repeating many themes found throughout the Fourth Gospel.  One theologian names chapter 17: “theologically, one of the most important chapters in the Gospel.”1

But this text isn’t a sermon on how to pray.  Instead, it’s better seen as a window into the heart of Jesus, displaying for all disciples the intimate bonds of love that connect the Father, the Son, disciples from age to age, and all of us flesh, being caught up in the life of God now and forever.

Our question, then, becomes: How does this prayer of Jesus for his disciples shape and inform the lives of us, those who continue to follow him?
1   Living between times

In the narrative time of the Gospel, Jesus is at the table with his disciples.  But in the theological time of the text, a post-resurrection Jesus speaks a prayer over his disciples from age to age (future disciples enter the prayer at 17:20).

The verb tenses alternate between future and past in the prayer, making it hard to distinguish between the words of the pre-resurrection Jesus in the narrative time of the text and the post-resurrection Jesus in the lived time of the hearers/readers.

As an example of this slippage back and forth between tenses and times, in verse 4 we have a declaration of Jesus having finished the work that the Father gave him to do, though in narrative time, “It is finished,” doesn’t come until way later (19:30).

In the contemporary life of discipleship, we, too, live our lives caught between the pre-resurrection and post-resurrection realities. How would the disciples around the table hearing this prayer understand words like “Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed” (17:5), where they sat in that moment—before betrayal, before trial, before crucifixion, before resurrection?

Here that dance of unity comes to fruition in Christlike attributes of humility, unity with others who suffer, & the resistance of evil, shown as a stealthy lion waiting to pounce.

How do we hear the promises of Jesus spoken in this prayer where we sit now? Alternating between future and past tenses in our own life, the pre-resurrection prayers and post-resurrection promises also catch us up in a spiral of time akin to “eternal life.”

How does this prayer of Jesus for his disciples shape and inform the lives of us, those who continue to follow him?             2   Eternal life, now

Eternal life plays a significant theological role throughout the Fourth Gospel. But our contemporary theological notions of what eternal life means can become unhelpful when overlaid on John’s much richer understanding of the term.

As Mary Coloe explains it, “As Son, he reveals God’s love for the world and God’s desire to draw all into God’s own eternity life, which is to participate in the very being of God.”2 (She uses “eternity life” to emphasize a different quality of life, rather than simply the elongation of it.) Or, in the words of David Ford, “I have read the whole Gospel as an invitation to enter into a relationship of trusting Jesus, with continuing ‘life in his name’ involving an ongoing drama of desiring, learning, praying, and loving in community, for the sake of God’s love for the world.”3

John uses other language that may also be helpful in preaching depth into the notion of “eternal life,” like “abiding” in Jesus (see John 15). Jesus’s preaching of “eternal life,” “abiding,” “dwelling,” et cetera is an intensely relational life of love that disciples are invited into now, not just in the hereafter.

We’ve often mistakenly allowed “eternal life” to relativize our experience of the here-and-now, diminishing its significance in a life of abiding in Jesus. But Jesus’s words offer another relativization: that of identity, not of time.

Ford points to the use of “authority” in 17:2 & its relationship to the same word used in 1:12: “he gave the power to become children of God.”4 Our identity as children of God, afforded by the authority of the logos in the primordial words of the prologue, is the marker of our lives bound up in eternal life with God, now.

This glorification gives eternal life to Jesus’ followers, but eternal life is not described as white robes and harps in heaven. Rather, as Jesus states in 17:3, eternal life is knowing (biblically, that means having one’s life intimately and completely enmeshed with) God. Eternal life begins now for those who are in relationship with Christ.

How does this prayer of Jesus for his disciples shape and inform the lives of us, those who continue to follow him?   3   Authority over all flesh

Verse 2 reads, “You have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him.” But the word for “people” here, in the Greek, is “flesh”.

That’s a more expansive term than words that mean humans only.  And while it’s translated “people” here, we can play with this language a bit to see what else “authority over all flesh, to give eternal life” might mean, especially if we are helping others to expand their notion of eternal life to encompass relationality & abiding in the life of God.  Our ecological kin are also implicated in this heaven/earth, divine/flesh dwelling in the here-and-now intimacy of being caught up in the life of God now and forever.

And the warning about the devil prowling like a lion (perhaps one of Luther’s inspirations for stanza 3 of “A mighty fortress”) does not assume that Satan is the source of suffering or persecution; rather, the tempter can use such things to drive Christians to discontent and despair. God can use the same sufferings, however, to strengthen our faith and sense of connection to God and each other.

How does this prayer of Jesus for his disciples shape and inform the lives of us, those who continue to follow him?              4   Take courage

Just prior to the start of this passage, Jesus says to the disciples, “The hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, each one to his home, and you will leave me alone. … In the world you face persecution, but take courage: I have conquered the world!” (16:32–33).

Before we get to the theological richness of the prayer, we begin with stark words of the present situation. And as the final words of Jesus before the passion, this passage reaches a theological climax just before a plunging descent into betrayal and arrest, trial and crucifixion in the very next chapters.

We are each given a mission based on how God created us.  But that mission and ministry travel a rugged road. The unity for which Christ has prayed is not always evident. Even with the power of the promised Spirit, worldly powers challenge and threaten, and enemies prevail. Even within the burgeoning Christian movement, disagreements and disappoints reign.

These texts challenge us and the Christian community, but each also carries promise.

At the very end of the prayer, not included in this day’s Gospel reading, Jesus ends with the comforting words, “I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them and I in them” (17:26)

So may it be for all of us.  God loves you, and so do I.   AMEN