The Risen Christ: Oracle of Prayer

 7 Easter B            May 20, 2012   

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26  Psalm 1
1 John 5:9-13  John 17:6-19

Lectionary Link

  You have seen the four letters WWJD, meaning what would Jesus do?   WWJP could mean What would Jesus pray?   WWTAOJTTJWP would mean, What would the author of John think that Jesus would pray?  And with all of these unpronounceable alphabetic acronyms, I hope that I am confusing you.

  Today in our Gospel lesson we have the longest recorded prayer of Jesus.  It is not in any other Gospel.  And one wonders how in the days when there were no hidden microphones, how such a verbatim prayer of Jesus could have been remembered by someone particularly if Jesus was praying alone.

  The sheer logical confusion does invite us to look at the oracular function in the early Christian community.  How did the early followers of Jesus understand oracle or the channeling of the insights of Jesus within the community long after he was gone?  Could the channeled words of Jesus through one of his followers be regarded as the words of Jesus himself?  Such a question is only raised by us who live in the age of ownership of so-called intellectual property.

  The prayer of Jesus in the seventeenth chapter of John requires us to ponder the conditional verb tenses in  if-then statements.  The writer of John’s Gospel wrote the prayer assuming a relationship with the risen Christ in this conditional mode: If Jesus were here now, then he would be praying in this way.  And now as we read it move to conditional past-perfect tense: If Jesus had been present with the community of John, then he would have prayed in the way that it is written in John 17.

  I mean to be confusing because art and oracle can make present those who are absent.  Does Shakespeare become present when his plays are read or performed?  Does Mozart become present when his music is played or performed?

  The community of John took very seriously this belief about being one with Christ and one with God the Father.  They believed that Christ was their vine and they were branches and their branches were coursing with the interior sap of the Spirit of Christ so that there was a sharing in their inner life, the very life of Christ.  And that sharing of inner life could produce “words of Christ” and “prayers of Christ.”  And because of this oneness factor, the spoken words and written words that came from the state of unity with Christ could be regarded as the words of Christ or the oracle of Christ who was alive and speaking within the community of followers.

  Art and oracle confuse time; how else could this Gospel quote Jesus as praying, “And now I am no longer in the world….and while I was with them.”  Where is the physical location of such a Jesus who is praying these words?  Where is Mozart when some musician is channeling his music?  Does Mozart attain a trans-historical presence and immortality in his creations?

  Today is Ascension Sunday; I remind you that the Feast of the Ascension was celebrated on Thursday to a less than standing room crowd.  The ascended Christ is the inspired imagination of the church’s dealing with the obvious sense of Christ continuing presence even while he could no longer be seen or touched.  But the ascended Christ could definitely still be heard and could be known as a continuing oracle with the people who gathered to pray in his name.

  As we move on toward Pentecost and Trinity Sunday, we see that it is Jesus who is responsible for the Trinitarian confusion: “I and the Father are one,” said he.  The Father-God aspect of the personality of Jesus and his teaching of the Parent-God aspect of the personality of his followers created this “alternate” family and this alternate way of being in the world, but not just the world, but also an alternate world, the world into which one was born by the Spirit of God.

  Art, poetry and oracle confuse time and space and for that reason I believe that the communities that generated the New Testament writings as God’s word presented those words as an aesthetic bending of the dimension of time and space.  The aesthetic bending of the dimension of time and space account for the apparent logical confusion in the use of the same words in multivalent ways.  Take the case of the Greek word,  cosmos  or world.  Cosmos or world in John’s Gospel is a world that is loved by God, but not supposed to be loved by the followers of Christ.  The kingdom of Jesus was not supposed to be of this world; so the kingdom of Jesus was an alternate and parallel world.  The followers of Jesus were to be in the world but not of the world.  The writer of John’s Gospel believed that Jesus taught us to live in two families, our natural and spiritual families.  Jesus taught us to live in two worlds, the natural world and the spiritual world.  The apparent confusion of language has to do with the fact that every word can be interpreted from the point of view of the natural world or from the spiritual world.  If we don’t understand this in John’s Gospel, we can find it to be a very confusing book indeed.

  Consistent with John’s Gospel theme, “In the beginning was the Word”  the Risen Christ is still the One who has ascended to a closer proximity with his heavenly parent.  And as the older sibling, Christ is the one who prays words for us and for our success in befriending each other toward the values of the Gospel.  The Gospel of John portrays Jesus as an ever present oracle of prayer who offers endless words of petition for our well-being.  In our recognition of Christ as ever-present oracle, we in our attention to prayer try to enter into the words of Christ who has gone to that other interior world which we can only partially perceive and live in now but we can become more aware of it as we make the effort to attend to this alternate world.

  I hope that my words today have confused you; made you bend time and space dimension not to some TV Twilight Zone do-do-do-do reality, but to the reality of the sacred, which is a parallel reality that all of us can experience in this very seeming “ordinary” world.

  And if my words seem to confuse you now, in just wait a few minutes and I’ll be selling you an even bigger Brooklyn bridge, when I hand you bread and wine and tell you that they are the body and blood of Christ.

  Good art, poetry and our experience of their sublime effects seems to bend space and time and so does the experience of the sacred.  As we have read what Jesus might have prayed, we see that the words invite us to know another kind of relationship of oneness to a parent who is not an earthly parent but who is a spiritual parent who is known because the metaphor borrows from the notion of what an ideal parent-child relationship might be. What does a parent want?  A parent wants to be able to share the very best with one’s child.  Jesus came to teach us that God wants to share everything of the Godly world with the family of people who inhabit this earth.

  Let us continue to go to the risen Christ as our oracle; we need not claim that we have any infallible interpretations of this oracle.  We but ask for insights from Christ as our oracle to get us through this day with the excellence that we need to be the best we can be for the well being of the world that we live in.

  The writer of John’s Gospel believed that he knew what Jesus would have prayed.  And now and you and I turn to Christ again as our oracle, and ask what Jesus would pray even now?  And what would the risen Christ pray through us?  To the answer of this question we now give our lives.  Amen.