The Sunday after Ascension is a time to wait and pray. With the Feast of the Ascension we have marked Jesus’ final withdrawal from his human presence on earth, and now we have to wait ten days – till next Sunday – before we can celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit, which makes him present to us in a new way. After the Ascension the disciples were told to stay in Jerusalem to wait for the gift which had been promised. As they waited they spent much time in prayer, and it was during this time of prayerful waiting that it occurred to them it would now be right to fill the place among them that had been left vacant when Judas separated himself from their company. We read in our first lesson of the way they arrived at a common mind, and chose Matthias.
There wasn’t much else they could do, but as they waited and prayed, coming to terms with the fact that Jesus was not going to reappear among them any more, they must have called to mind what it was that Jesus had prayed for on their behalf, on that last night before he was taken from them, when he tried to prepare them for the coming separation. In the days that followed, the devastating shock of his brutal death had quickly been followed by his wonderful reappearance, as real as he had ever been. So it was only now, having witnessed his final withdrawal into the heavens, that they were really having to confront the fact that he just wasn’t there any more. As they waited and prayed, perhaps in the very room where they had shared with him that last evening of companionship, their thoughts must have turned again and again to what he had said that night, what he had prayed for on their behalf. So it makes excellent sense that we should have heard part of that prayer for our gospel reading this morning.
As the prayer moves forward we shall note three things that he asked for, but it is worth noting that Jesus didn’t rush in with loads of requests. He began by laying before his Father the heart of the relationship between himself and his disciples which might be threatened by the separation for which he wanted them to be prepared. The disciples were His Father’s gift to him, and he had shared that gift with them. When he says: I have made your name known to those you gave me (v 6), he means that he has shared with them his intimate knowledge of what God his Father is like. They had believed what he told them, and more important still, they had accepted that what he taught came to him from the Father, who had sent him – the words you gave to me … they have received … and they have believed (v 8,9). With the generosity that is characteristic of love, he overlooks the many occasions on which they have failed utterly to understand what he has been trying to tell them. Looking into their hearts – accepting the offering of their best intentions – he pleads on their behalf he pleads that they have been brought into the same relationship of knowledge and trust as existed between Jesus and his Father. All mine are yours, and yours are mine, he insists.
But there is now a problem which he needs to share with his Father. It’s been all very well while he was there to teach, to steady, to admonish if necessary, to encourage, to protect and care for them. But now he was not going to be in the world with them any more, yet they were still going to be in the world, still subject to the pressures and temptations which had tripped them up in the past. How were they to be protected in the future? Only now does he begin to make any request. If he is not going to be there to protect them any more, his Father who cares for them as much as he does, who gave them to him in the first place, his Father must now protect them himself. Holy Father, protect them in your name – that is to say, by your power – so that they may be one, as we are one. The disciples are to be drawn into the same relationship with His Father as he himself has enjoyed, a relationship of reciprocal love leading to willing obedience, a relationship of utter and complete identity of will and purpose and love, making them one, as he and his Father had always been one.
So the first request is for unity, unity among themselves as well as unity of purpose with God their Father. And the second request, which flows naturally from the first, is his prayer for joy – my joy, he says, made complete in themselves. The joy will be the natural consequence of the unity. There is nothing more joyful than a relationship of reciprocal love, and that is the relationship which he wants them to have. So he knows that they will have joy in their lives, as he has known joy. Joy? How can he speak of joy, at the very moment when one of his friends has gone out into the night to betray him? He is facing the most appalling pain and misery, and as he looks around the table, he probably knows that a similar fate awaits most of the disciples too. But he also knows, and wants them to know, that nothing that an angry and evil world can throw at them will be capable of separating them from his Father’s love, which has been the source of his deepest inward joy, just as it will be the source of their joy too.
Unity, joy, and finally truth. Sanctify (or consecrate) them in the truth – your word is truth. Just as he has been sent into the world by His Father to witness to the truth about God, so now he is sending them into the world to witness to the truth. So he prays to his Father to sanctify them in the truth – that is to say to formally commission them as witnesses to the truth. And he begins by consecrating himself to the truth the truth about himself and about God to which he would stand witness in the crisis which he was about to face. Was it not the truth about his own vision of himself – the Son of Man – seated at the right hand of God that would finally precipitate his condemnation for blasphemy before Caiaphas? Was it not the truth about his identity that so troubled Pilate that he had to proclaim it however ambiguously from the sign on Jesus’ cross – Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews? Was it not the truth about Jesus’ life and death and resurrection that Peter and the others would soon be called upon to proclaim fearlessly in the streets of Jerusalem and before the very courts that had condemned Jesus to death? Is it not to-day the truth about the nature of God – his justice and truth as well as his love and his mercy – to which we all need to bear witness. We do that in lives which reflect that truth, because they are joined to his life and to one another by the unity for which he prayed, and blessed by the joy in his presence which no one can take from us?
Jesus’ prayers would soon be answered in the gift of the Holy Spirit, which binds us all to one another and to him, the Spirit of Unity, the Spirit of Joy, the Spirit of Truth. We wait and pray today for that same spirit to enter our hearts.