Lectionary Commentaries for May 21, 2023
Seventh Sunday of Easter

from WorkingPreacher.org


Gospel

Commentary on John 17:1-11

Gennifer Benjamin Brooks

Jesus was a man of prayer. He taught his disciples to pray. That teaching resulted in a model of prayer—the Lord’s Prayer—that has become an integral part of the Christian witness.

In this text, we find Jesus once again at prayer. Jesus is in conversation with his disciples, and he ends his conversation with a prayer, spoken in their presence, perhaps with the hope of having them listen in to the hopes and dreams he has for them. As he taught his disciples, once again, Jesus begins the prayer by calling on his father, as the source of his being and his power, the one to whom he addresses his requests.

Theologian Rebecca Clair Young says: “The prayer describes his relationship with God as well as his relationship to the world into which God sends him.”1 In his prayer, he intercedes with God not only for himself but also for the disciples then and in the future. Even the words that seem to be about himself are really on what he as the Son of God can offer to his disciples. Jesus’ call to be glorified through his death names his crucifixion as a moment of triumph for him but most importantly a moment of affirmation of his divinity for his disciples. Jesus claims the glory that is due to him for the completion of his earthly mission as savior.

Unlike the model of the Lord’s Prayer, this prayer seems more instructive to the disciples about who they are and who Jesus is in their lives. The prayer reads like a narrative of Jesus’ role as Savior and guide, as leader and example for the present disciples and those yet to come. It moves from his incarnation through his ministry and leads to his upcoming passion. His intercession on behalf of the disciples offers a mode of prayer whereby one makes intercession for others. Jesus reports to God on his earthly mission and at the same time informs the disciples of what they have received through him.

The challenge that this prayer presents lies in Jesus’ words that seems to suggest a preference for the disciples. He says, “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” (John 17:9). The language seems exclusive and may lead erroneously to the belief that only those who follow Christ may have the favor of God.

It is important to contextualize the passage by considering both the situation with Jesus and the disciples and also with the Johannine community. Jesus is speaking within the gathered community of his disciples, but the text is written to the Johannine community. As Nancy J. Ramsay informs us:

The dualism of the Johannine community poses a challenge for us. The term “world” most often refers to a dangerous, hostile place that opposes God’s hopes for justice and mercy. In this passage Jesus prays not for the whole world but for those whom he has taught and guided into knowledge and love of God. He prays confidently for their (and our) protection in a hostile world.2

Jesus’ prayer is appropriate to both the disciples and to the Johannine community. As a model it must be recognized as such and its meaning for the church today must also take into consideration the divisions that mark society globally and locally as well as the divisions in the Christian church and within denominations.

One additional element of this prayer that is noteworthy is that at the moment of prayer Jesus “looked up to heaven” (John 17:1). Young reminds us that “The biblical view of heaven is different from our view of the universe. Where our ancestors looked up and imagined a heavenly dwelling for the divine, we see physical space extending billions of light years. Even in the age of science, though, it remains significant that Jesus looks up at this moment, because he is looking beyond worldly limits to a far greater, unlimited life.”3 While the focus for himself may be the cross and the resurrection, his vision for the disciples is that they will flourish in ministry united by his name. Further, the disciples and we are moved to understand the unity of the Father and the Son. Jesus, through his resurrection, is joined with God in the eternal realm and all who follow Jesus have the assurance that because of his love for his followers, they are also recipients of God’s love.

Jesus’ prayer for his followers extends beyond the disciples referenced in the text to the followers of Christ over time, into today and beyond into the future. Jesus’ prayer is offered in the assurance that God hears and God answers. That is a model that all Christians are called to follow. As Jesus did, we too must pray believing that God not only hears but also responds to prayer. The final words of this prayer are a call to unity for the followers of Jesus. It is a prayer that needs to be offered on every occasion of prayer by every Christian because it remains an unrealized petition on behalf of our Savior. Even with advances in ecumenical and interfaith movements, there are deliberate actions that intentionally divide the people of God. Whether or not they are followers of Christ, God intends that all people on earth may live in unity. Ultimately, that is the major element of Jesus’ prayer that we must offer on every occasion—“that they may be one, as we (God) are one.”


Notes

  1. Rebecca Blair Young, “Theological Perspective on John 17:1-5,” in Feasting on the Gospels John, Volume 2 Chapters 10-21, (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015), 212.
  2. Nancy J. Ramsay, “Pastoral Perspective on John 17:1-11,” in Feasting on the Word Year A, Volume 2 Lent through Eastertide, (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 540.
  3. Young, 212.

First Reading

Commentary on Acts 1:6-14

Jeremy L. Williams

What question would you pose to the recently resurrected Jesus? In the passage, we find one that the apostles raised: “Is this the time when you will restore the kingdom (basileian) to Israel?”  The resurrected Jesus does not directly answer that question but redirects them both rhetorically and literally as he is lifted into heaven. The apostles then become the interviewees as men dressed in white ask them why they are standing confused. I submit that it is worth considering Jesus’ redirection as not only instructive for the ancient apostles but also for those with contemporary inquisitive minds.

Jesus redirects the apostles’ question, because it is pointed in the wrong direction. Behind this enquiry is a concern about Israel resuming geopolitical autonomy rivaling the glory days of David’s biblical reign. This concern could have multiple implications, two of which are worth engaging here. The first implication could be that the apostles expected Jesus to align with a nationalist cause that limited God’s favor and relationship to one nation. Remember that in the historical moment that Acts portrays there is no place called Israel. The official names of the area are in Acts 1:8: Judaea and Samaria. “Israel” for certain groups could function as a unifying nationalist cause. This is not to suggest that most or even many first and second-century Jewish people understood the term as such, but this type of use would have certainly been in the mind of some of the first readers of Acts. Jesus’ response to the apostles forecloses such an engagement though, because he explains that such activity falls solely in God’s authority, way outside of human hands that would indubitably use such authority for harm.

The harm that stems from humans negatively wielding authority over others was epitomized in the rule of the Romans, which could have been another implication of the apostles’ question concerning the restoration of the kingdom to Israel. In this way, the question of restoring the kingdom to Israel is less about keeping all others out and is more acutely aimed at keeping oppressors out. This question could be understood as a request for liberation from the Roman Empire’s domination, exploitation, and taxation. Still, Jesus’ response is that the timetable for that liberation is within God’s authority, but they are not to wait idly until God topples the empire.

Although the apostles did not have authority (exousia), Jesus redirects them to realize that they would have power (dynamis). The power that they would receive would come from the very Holy Spirit through whom Jesus had already been giving them instructions (Acts 1:2). They would be empowered to be witnesses (martyres). The term “witness” has become overladen with Christian tradition as is the Greek term behind it—martys—which became a very technical term later in Christian history. Such overinterpretation has ignored the plainer meaning of the term, which is to be a truth-teller, especially one who testifies in a court scenario. This reading of the term aligns with its use throughout the text as the apostles frequently find themselves on trial.

After Jesus had been violently executed by the Romans and sentenced to a criminal’s death, the apostles are recruited to testify and set the record straight about what Jesus was all about. The resurrected Jesus redirects the apostles from questions that were in God’s authority, in order to lead them to see their own power that would transform the world and bring them into direct confrontation with both Roman and Jerusalem officials. Their power to tell the truth would directly challenge those who preferred to advance a lie for their own agenda. Their power to set the record straight would complicate the narrative of an empire that proclaimed peace and security while wielding lethal violence especially against low status people. Jesus redirects them from getting overwhelmed by what was outside of their control, and he leads them to anticipate the power that would be in their control for turning Jerusalem, Judaea, Samaria, and the world into what it should be.

The apostles were not only redirected by Jesus’ words but they were also physically redirected as they watched him ascend out of their sight. Jesus’ ascension redirects them to look up. They look up above anything the Roman Empire could ever claim to dominate. They look up above any individual group or set of people. But before they could get lost in the heavenly vision, the men in white brought them back to earth with a crash, saying, “You men of Galilee” (Acts 1:11). They were not called apostles, they were not called Israelites, they were not called Jews or Judeans, but they were reminded that they are Galileans from an insignificant, concrete place, and they were outsiders in Jerusalem. Also, they were criminal co-conspirators with a leader who had been sentenced to capital punishment less than two months ago and that leader had left them with only a promise of power.

The men in white asked the apostles a question to redirect them from getting lost in the clouds. They asked them, “why do you stand here gazing at the sky?” Implicit in that question is an instruction: move forward with what you have seen. The portfolio for what they had witnessed had just increased. They had already been witnesses to their own callings by Jesus and of course they were witnesses of his teaching, miracles, exorcisms, healings, execution, and resurrection. Now they were witnesses of him being lifted beyond the clouds. With all they had seen, time was out for looking and time was in for speaking and testifying. Their question to Jesus about when the kingdom would be restored to Israel ultimately became a question answered with a question when the men in white asked “why do you stand here gazing?” Rather than focus on authority outside of your control, why not focus on the power in your hands?


Psalm

Commentary on Psalm 68:1-10, 32-35

Joel LeMon

When God shows up, everything changes.1

Psalm 68 celebrates the appearance of God as divine king and catalogues the implications of God’s rule throughout the entire world.

This highly complex Psalm contains some of the Old Testament’s most challenging grammar, vocabulary, and syntax. It also presents uniquely explicit depictions of God’s violence against the enemies (verses 21-31). For better or worse, these verses do not appear in the lectionary reading for this Sunday, or any Sunday.

To put it mildly, Psalm 68 is a difficult text. Preaching from it requires a great deal of sensitivity to its original historic context and especially an understanding of the royal ideologies of the ancient Near East. Despite these interpretive challenges, we can discern a basic theological message that underpins the psalm: God’s presence brings about vindication for those who are suffering. God comes to deliver the oppressed.

The opening verses invite God to reveal God’s self: “Let God rise up!” (verse 1). In the logic of the psalm, the presence of God banishes all threats. God’s “enemies,” “those that hate him,” and “the wicked” must retreat when God arises.

The Psalter contains a number of similar entreaties for God to rise (for example, Psalm 3:7; 7:6; 9:19). In virtually every case, these texts appear on the lips of those who look to God to bring about justice. To “rise” means to assume the authority to act as king and judge on behalf of those who are crying out for salvation.

God’s judgement, while providing protection to the suffering, has devastating implications for the oppressors. Through a series of richly evocative images, the psalm describes the enemies as disintegrated, dissolved, and destroyed (verses 1-2). The righteous, however, have the opposite response to the risen God. They join together as one in praise (verse 4).

This text provides many challenges for translators. One of the most famous occurs in verse 4, where God is described as either “the one who rides of the clouds” or “the one who rides through the wilderness.” The titles have very different implications for how one understand the profile of God vis-à-vis other ancient Near Eastern deities. Yet the most important issue for the psalmist is establishing the particular name — and thus the reputation of God. The revelation of the divine name Yah, the short form of Yahweh, appears only in this verse. However, the entire psalm is dedicated to exploring the identity of Yahweh as the unchallenged king of heaven.

God’s fundamental orientation is toward the helpless: widows, orphans, the desolate one (or “abandoned one”), and prisoners (verses 5-6). In a patriarchal culture such as ancient Israel, widows and orphans struggle to survive without a husband or father to provide protection, economic viability, and honor. So God fills the gap left by the absent man (verse 5). Likewise, Yahweh provides for those who are abandoned, giving them a home (verse 6).

Yahweh’s manumission of “prisoners” as described in verse 6 might possibly be understood as a work of advocacy for those who have committed crimes. Yet given the fact that there was no large-scale, long-term imprisonment for criminals in ancient Israel, the “prisoners” in this context are more likely prisoners of war, enslaved captives, or falsely accused individuals awaiting trial. People in any of these situations would need God’s immediate intervention to preserve their lives. Without divine intervention, they would have little hope.

It was indeed a hopeless people whom God delivered from Egypt. Verses 7-10 describe the exodus, the community’s movement through the wilderness from slavery to freedom. In the context of that journey, the forces of nature are bent to God’s will. The earthquake and abundant rain (verses 8-9) are a manifestation of God’s power that provide for those who suffer. To be clear, these displays do not happen simply for God to show off but to bring about deliverance.

The description of God’s power over natural forces gives way to a description of the power of God over all human forces (verses 11-31). This large section of the psalm describes God participating in all the activities of ancient Near Eastern kings. God is called king explicitly in verse 24, and like a king, God leads troops into battle and conquers other warrior kings (verse 11-14). God rides a chariot home from battle in triumph (verses 17-18). God brings back prisoners of war (verse 18). God receives tribute (verses 18, 29, 31). God oversees ritual processions (verses 24-27). God shows mastery over wild animals through ceremonial hunts (verse 30).

That God fulfills all these functions of ancient kingship implicitly acknowledges that the kings of Judah and Israel largely failed to live up to the expectations of Near Eastern royal ideology. The witness of the Deuteronomistic history (especially 1-2 Samuel, 1-2 Kings) confirms the failure of the kingship in Israel and Judah as does modern historiography of the biblical world. Thus, the psalmist felt a special urgency for Yahweh to be understood as the divine king, both to provide a model of the proper exercise of power and to serve as king when the kingdom ceased to exist.

When leaders fail to live up to expectations, God’s identity emerges even more strongly as the dominant power in the universe. The psalm’s ultimate affirmation of divine power chastens all other leaders who might assume positions of absolute leadership. In fact, the final verses of the psalm (verses 32-35), where the lectionary reading resumes, contain a call for all the kings of the earth, the potential rivals of God, to acknowledge God’s authority.

This ancient psalm is rife with challenges for the modern interpreter. We must navigate a profoundly difficult text that describes cultural and political institutions that are far removed from our modern democracies, at least in their ideal forms. The psalmist uses analogies from his own historical context to describe the power of God. Those analogies seem strange to our ears. Yet, at the heart of the psalm is a conviction that God’s power is ultimately oriented toward the deliverance of those who are suffering. God’s power is expressed not for some sadistic delight in violent spectacle, but to provide protection for those who are oppressed and have no one to defend them.


Notes

  1. Commentary first published on this site on May 28, 2017.

Second Reading

Commentary on 1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11

John Frederick

In 1 Peter 4-5, the apostle continues to care for the souls of the early church in the midst of the fiery trials of faithfulness in a faithless world. When we, like the early Christians, come face to face with suffering, it can cause us to weaken in our trust of God, to feel abandoned by God, or at the very least, to reckon that we are the victims of God’s arbitrary allowance of suffering. Peter’s pastoral encouragement here reminds us: the afflicted church is not the abandoned church; the afflicted church is the authentic church. It is the afflicted church that is formed in the way of Christ’s sufferings so that we might be transformed by Christ’s subsequent glories (1 Peter 1:11).

The afflicted church, it is worth noting, is instructed to be sober minded, watchful, and to stand firm in the faith, in resistance—not merely to human agents—but to our “adversary the devil” who prowls around like a lion waiting to devour us (5:8-9). The primary source of suffering is often satanic. It is striking, therefore, that Peter’s method for combatting the devil is, in part, accomplished by maintaining an immovable fidelity to sound doctrine. Here, “your faith” (New Revised Standard Version) is better translated “the faith” (New International Version) because there is no immediate second person pronoun “your” modifying “faith” in the Greek text. Peter’s teaching here is similar to what we find in Ephesians 4 and 6. There the “deceitful schemes” (Greek methodeia) that toss the children of God around to and fro through human cunningness “by every wind of doctrine” (Ephesians 4:14) are the same “schemes” that require believers to put on “the whole armor of God” so that we might be able to “stand against” the “schemes” or “methods” of the devil.

1 Peter 1:6-7 reveals that the “various trials” that we undergo as Christians are not futile; they are formative. Through resilience in the midst of our many struggles, our faith is tested precisely so that it might persevere and reach its intended goal, namely, “praise and glory and honor” when Christ returns. The formative power of resilient virtue during seasons of suffering was not an idea that originated with Christians like Peter and Paul (see also Romans 5:1-8). Virtue ethics, the idea that acting in righteous ways builds habits and dispositions that result in the formation of virtuous character was an ethical principle that was ubiquitous amongst the ancient Greco-Roman moral philosophers.

Yet, Peter offers something more here than a simply Christianized version of Aristotle. The uniqueness of Peter’s claim can be observed in 1 Peter 5:10-11. There we observe that the telos of resilient Christian suffering is not merely temporal ethical character or, as Aristotle proposed, “happiness” (Greek eudaemonia). No, for Peter, the end result of Christian resilience is glory. Glory! It is such a glorious word, isn’t it? But in our willingness to glory in the gloriousness of the word glory, we are often so familiar with the term that we never stop to ask if we can define it. We’re on a train bound for glory, we’re flying away to glory, but what is glory, and what is its larger significance in 1 Peter?

In the Old Testament God’s glory (Greek doxa; Hebrew ḵāḇôḏ) is often associated with the splendor and majesty of God’s visible presence manifested to his people. In Exodus 16:10 “the glory of the LORD” appeared to the people of Israel in a cloud (see also Exodus 24:16; Leviticus 9:3; Numbers 6:19; Isaiah 40:5). Later, Moses prays to God: “Please show me your glory” (Exodus 33:18). In the New Testament, when the Son of Man returns, he will come “in clouds with great power and glory” (Mark 13:26). Believers “rejoice in hope of the glory of God” (Romans 5:2). And, similar to 1 Peter, the apostle Paul teaches that “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18). As we behold “the glory of the Lord” with an unveiled face, we are “transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). This glory is none other than “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).

Other times, however, when the New Testament talks about “glory” it is referring to “honor,” “respect,” or “reputation.” The word doxa, for example, can refer to the head-coverings of a woman as “her glory” (1 Corinthians 11:15). In Philippians 1:11, our righteous acts are said to bring “glory and praise” to God. Here “glory,” refers to “reverence” and “honor” that is directed toward God as a result of the morally virtuous behavior of human beings.

Glory is operative in 1 Peter as both the visible manifestation of God’s majestic nature and “honor/respect.” It is crucial to a contextually precise interpretation of this letter that we recognize the function of “glory” as “honor” in the midst of Christian suffering and persecution. In the ancient world, the concept of shame was a significant ethical motivator. The opportunities and experiences afforded to an individual, and by extension to their entire family, were directly related to the reputation of the family name. Bringing shame on a family was not just a matter of causing damage to an individual’s personal feelings, but of disrupting their very livelihood. There was a direct link between shame and social ostracization.

When we think of glory only as the totality of our spiritual state in the presence of God, we miss the paradox presented by Peter: suffering is supposed to lead to shame, but in Christ Jesus suffering will result in everlasting glory, honor, and respect. The abiding antidote to suffering in the present is the defeat of suffering’s shame in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Far from being cast off due to a shameful reputation, God will himself “restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish” us by nothing less than his own “power” (1 Peter 5:10) and “glory” (4:11).