Easter 7A Reflection (John 17:1-11)

Have you ever experienced a sense of difficulty understanding the Bible, especially the words of Jesus? I always do! Jesus does seem to use strange and odd expressions and statements. In today’s gospel lesson, there are three seemingly confusing remarks or expressions Jesus makes: 1) glorification, 2) eternal life, and 3) the world (depicted as “dangerous” that we need God’s protection). In this reflection, I’ll briefly discuss what they may possibly mean. 

1) Glorification: He talks about glorifying God and himself in us and so on. “Glory” isn’t something that we often use except when we pray the Lord’s Prayer/Our Father. (i.e. “For thine is the kingdom...and the glory.) “Glorifying” a specific person is even less common in our days. Can you imagine yourself praying to God in the same way Jesus does, “Glorify your daughter, me so that this daughter may glorify you?” Quite odd. So here’s what Jesus means when he talks about glorification. He means resurrection. God is glorified in the resurrection of Christ that God is not bound in the phenomenal realm but is beyond. Another aspect of glorification is that Jesus asks to be glorified in God’s own presence, that the crucifixion takes place in God’s presence, that there’s no separation from God’s presence at the moment of death. Although God’s silence feels like God’s absence, Jesus’s own cries on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” paradoxically become God’s eternal presence entering into our own suffering. Because of his cries, we know God is never absent. Thus, we mourn and weep for those who might have died in the absence of their loved ones at their bedside during this pandemic, they never died alone but in the presence of God. 

2) Eternal life: Throughout the gospel, Jesus isn’t so interested in the afterlife. Eternal life for him is to know God. For us, to know God in Christ IS eternal life. This knowledge of God, however, is not information about God. It can be obtained only from one’s experience of God in which one encounters God in the most intimate and personal way. All our experience of God is first-person. It is subjective, intimate, and personal. Our knowledge of God stems from our inner experience of God, in which God and I are one. In this sense, we cannot know God by studying God but only by loving God and others. Imagine your loved ones. We can confidently say we know them, though never fully, because we love them. The more we love them, the more we know them. This desire to love God is the same desire to be one with God. This state of our oneness with God is what Christ reveals to us. Christ reveals that we’re eternally one with God. In Christ, you and I are perpetually one with God beyond life and death. Eternal life is not the life that we can only experience after we die but here and now in our loving experience with God. 

3) The “dangerous” world: Before we experience God’s loving union with us, God is merely a part of our lives as we are merely a part of the world and are in the world. But when we enter the presence of God, our thoughts, feelings, and senses disappear in our contemplative state and our whole being gazes upon (contemplatio in Latin) God’s presence. The world as we know disappears. The world doesn’t exist as an object as I don’t exist as a subject. The duality of the world and me, of you and me, and of subject and object ceases to exist. Everything (and everyone) becomes one. We realize that the world we see is constructed by our own consciousnesses of the five senses, cognition, and perception. What’s left is then our pure awareness or extramundane non-conceptual cognition that we see the world in us as a curious, undivided, and nonjudgmental observer. The world is in us as we are in God. We’re in the innermost presence of God. There’s nothing to fear anything or anyone and no need to repent, for we’re fully embraced in God’s grace that completely purifies and unconditionally loves us. (For example, when your body is entirely immersed in clean water, there’s no need to wash.) We’re protected from the world that is no longer bigger than or dangerous to us but rather, the world is in us. Thus Jesus says, “...protect them..., so that they may be one, as we are one.” This oneness, after all, is love. 

In the end, what matters the most is that you experience God’s oneness with your whole being. It can happen in your prayers, in quietude, in public worship, or in your interactions with others. During this unprecedented time, I pray our knowledge of God in Christ deepens as our loving encounter with God and neighbors matures. The very moment of loving in Christ is none other than the eternal here and now that Christ reveals to us.