Sweet Protection

John 17:6-19

‘I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me. I guarded them, and not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be fulfilled. But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves. I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth.

As we continue with the Gospel of John, we come now to a prayer— a prayer from Jesus to God. The passages over the past two weeks have involved Jesus preparing his disciples for when he leaves them, in various different ways. Two weeks ago, he was explaining that they would have to start scaling back and sacrificing if they were to continue to spread Jesus’ Good News after he was gone; last week, he told his disciples that the most crucial thing they must do in order to spread that Good News was to love one another—was to stay united and really listen and connect with one another in order to connect with the people of the world. This week, Jesus is continuing along these lines, but instead of talking directly to his disciples, he is praying to God on their behalf. He’s vouching for them, he’s making it known that these are the chosen ones who are going to continue his work when he’s gone; that just as Jesus was too good for this cruel world, so are they and so they will need God’s protection.

There are echoes of the Lord’s Prayer in this passage—it’s a sort of parallel, as much as John can parallel the other Gospels, of Matthew’s and Luke’s versions of the Lord’s Prayer, in which Jesus directly teaches his disciples how to pray. In John, instead, he decides to do the praying.

This, as Al rightly pointed out in Bible Study on Monday, seems like a funny scripture for a Mother’s Day sermon. The patriarchal, paternal, masculine language really kinda hits you over the head. Father this, father that. But as I was reading this very human, very genuine prayer, it really read to me as maternal, as parental; it also read to me as a little anxious. Jesus knows he’s leaving soon. And he’s nervous. He’s going to be gone for a long time, and though he knows and loves his disciples, it’s a lot of ask of them to carry on the divine knowledge and divine work that he’s been doing all this time—especially since they’ve shown again and again, they struggle to understand Jesus’ true purpose on this earth, they struggle to believe that he’s truly going to die, be resurrected, and eventually ascend; and they don’t understand the scope of his work, or the real truth of it, really. It’s no wonder he feels the need to give this pleading petition to God, to make sure his disciples will stay on the right path, and that they’ll be protected while doing so.

I went to Hampshire College for undergrad, which some of you may know, but I actually transferred there after a year at Simmons College in Boston. And the main reason I started out at Simmons was because at the time, I absolutely knew I needed to be in a city for college. But I was absolutely miserable there, and I went to Hampshire and I thrived. I bring this up because ever since then, even in my late teens and early twenties, I realized how nuts it was to expect an 18-year-old kid to know where they’ll be happy for the next four years. And now that I’m raising my own daughter, I think about what it must be like for a parent to watch their kid make these decisions. I think about the wild mix of pride, of anxiety, of joy, of fear watching these… legally speaking, adults, but kids, really, step out into the world. I’ll know it soon enough. And I imagine Jesus was feeling something similar here. He was preparing to watch these disciples, with minds he has shaped, go into the world without him—a world that would not be kind to them, and he was scared. Proud and confident in some ways— but surely he was also deeply nervous. “While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me. I guarded them…But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves. I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world,” Jesus says to God—in other words “I’ve protected them as long as I could, but I won’t able to be there soon, and they’re about to go out into this cruel world that wants no part of the love they’re preaching, so please, please make sure they love one another, and that they’re okay.”

I remember when I told my mom I realized I wanted to go into parish ministry—this was when I was in my third year in college, so she had already been through me realizing that I needed to transfer—and my mom… wasn’t exactly jumping for joy. She was afraid I didn’t have a thick enough skin. She was afraid I was too sensitive. Being privy to several different scandals at the church where I grew up, she was immediately nervous for me. Again—I think this is what Jesus was feeling. He was afraid this world would chew his disciples up and spit them out; he was afraid that they would succumb to the pressures of the world and break off into factions, no longer be a united front, and divided, they would fall.

That’s what so much of these last three weeks have been about—the unity of Jesus’ disciples. It’s been Jesus preparing them for his absence, making sure they remained united. Last week, we talked about his new and ultimate commandment: “Love one another.” In order to continue the work that Jesus had started, they would have to love one another unconditionally, the way Jesus loved them… the way a parent loves a child.

I find it impossible to preach any kind of Mother’s Day sermon without being completely inspired by Julian of Norwich. She was a medieval Christian nun and mystic who had beautiful musings and beliefs about faith and God, and she believed Jesus, despite the fact that by all accounts he was a cisgender male, to be this ultimate maternal figure. The way children are fed from the breast, so are we fed from his body and spirit, is what she believed.

She wrote,

…our Mother is working on us in various ways, in whom our parts are kept undivided; for in our Mother Christ, we profit and increase, and in mercy he reforms and restores us, and by the power of his Passion, his death and Resurrection he unites us to be our substance.

Remember last week, we talked about the fact that Jesus is the ultimate example of sacrificial love, one who would lay down his life for his friends, for all of humanity, and that is the type of love we must emulate. Here, Julian of Norwich sees that sacrificial love as maternal, and one that keeps us united as one—exactly what Jesus is asking of God in our passage for today— that God will make sure the disciples remain united by loving one another as Jesus loves them; as a parent loves their child.

And just as when a child goes out into the world, when they leave the nest, and a parent gets nervous for them, so does Jesus—or else, I can’t imagine he would be praying this way. “…the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world…I am not asking you to take them out of the world,” Jesus says. He knows the world will be cruel to them, but he also knows they can’t take the easy way out, that they have a calling and they have to fulfill that call. And though they will be protected, they will not be invincible. As we now know, they will be misunderstood, they will be mocked, some will be jailed— and this is the world Jesus is sending them into, without him physically there to guide them. But this is just how life works—we are parented, mentored, guided up a point, and then we make our own way, supported then by our peers and friends. “The kind, loving mother,” Julian of Norwich says,

who knows and sees the need of her child guards it very tenderly, as the nature and condition of motherhood will have. And always as the child grows in age and in stature, she acts differently, but she does not change her love. And when it is even older, she allows it to be chastised to destroy its faults, so as to make the child receive virtues and grace. This work, with everything which is lovely and good, [Jesus] performs in those by whom it is done.

And so, our relationship with Jesus may look differently as we go through life, as a relationship with a parent and child changes day by day, but that loving protection is always there.

Mother’s day is hard for some people. I was, in theory, aware of this before Frankie and my losses; and after my losses, I became painfully and acutely aware of this fact. The type of motherhood Julian of Norwich describes in her writings is that of the ideal motherhood, just as the type of sacrificial love that Jesus shows us by sacrificing his whole self is the ideal kind of love—that is, it is essentially impossible to replicate. And so we know that there are so many who have complicated relationships with their mother, or with motherhood—there are those who are estranged from their mothers, who are angry. There are many who grieve their mothers, who still pick up the phone to call before realizing they are no longer on this earth. There are those who wanted to be a mother but couldn’t; those who want to be a mother and are still trying; there are step-mothers navigating blended families; there are mothers who lost children; and so this day can feel painful for a lot of people. It can feel confusing and complicated. And so isn’t it kind of incredible, that we do have this ideal form of motherhood to always look to in Jesus?

Jesus says something kind of strange in this prayer, which may sound a little jarring initially: “I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me…”. It seems a little exclusionary, that he’s only asking for protection for his closest friends—but what he’s saying here is that because of how Jesus has raised them, and because of what they stand for, it’s going to be them against the world. “The world” Jesus refers to here means the evils of the world—the greed, the hatred, the corruption, all the horrible things society encourages, and those who take part in it. Jesus isn’t asking that the people who take part in these things be condemned; rather, he’s asking God to protect his beloved friends so that they can stand up to and change the evils of the world. And so when we are fighting for peace and justice on this earth, we have Jesus in our corner, anxiously biting his nails, watching us mess up and get hurt, but supporting us unconditionally along the way. No matter what kind of relationship we may have with a parent in this life, no matter if we decided or were able to procreate or not, we always have the love and support of Jesus.

And as we come to the end of this Easter season, with Jesus ascended to the heavens, and the Holy Spirit graciously bestowed to us, we know that the Holy Spirit will be there to guide us in this world that is just not hospitable to those who work against the powerful. We know that there is no avoiding some degree of pain and suffering in this world, but we know that that ultimate love of Jesus is always there, as a parent’s unconditional love, whether or not we experienced that in our earthly lives.

And so, on these complicated days when we’re asked to honor those we may not want to honor; when we asked to think about something we may not want to think about; when we are surrounded by supposedly happy images that bring us unintended pain; and as we make our way stumbling cluelessly, through this cruel world—let us remember the endless support, protection, and love that comes to us from Jesus. Let us remember, in the words of Julian of Norwich, “…that Jesus Christ, who opposes good to evil, is our true Mother. We have our being from him, where the foundation of motherhood begins, with all the sweet protection of love which endlessly follows.” Amen.