The Life of Faith
Easter 7A | John 17:1-11
One of the strange delights of the lectionary is spending half of the Easter season, not in the resurrection stories, but in John’s Farewell Discourse. At first glance, this seems really wrong. We aren’t just going back in time, but going back to Holy Week. It’s a little like gathering on Easter morning and hearing the Passion. There is a tone here we have to wrestle with.
It does sort of make sense, though. Because these are stories about preparing for life without Jesus present. They are teachings that feel more relevant today than they did then. We might choose to see them now as a kind of flashback, like the things the disciples might be remembering in those days after. Sharing the memories of Jesus and saying to each other “remember when he told us this?”
This is often how it works, isn’t it? That we hear things in our lives that we know are important, but we only half listen at the time because we aren’t there yet. And then, when we get there, we go “man, I sure wish I was listening better when he tried to tell us about this.”
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