Sermon for May 12, 2024
Readings:
On the night before Jesus died, he prayed. I know that it may seem odd now that we are well past Easter, and even past Our Lord’s Ascension into heaven, it may seem odd to jump back in our gospel readings to the night before Jesus was crucified, but that is where we go this morning.
I guess in a way it is only natural, because after the disciples had witnessed Jesus’s Resurrection and then his Ascension into heaven, their minds certainly would have gone back to retrace all their steps over the past few months. They would have looked back with newly opened eyes to reexamine everything Jesus ever said or did, and the things that had happened most recently would naturally have stood out more prominently in their minds. So, this morning we go back to Maundy Thursday, we go back to the evening of the Last Supper, to after dinner was over, and we hear Jesus’s own post-communion prayer.
“Holy Father, protect them,” he says. Jesus’s prayer is about his disciples. He is about to die, but his primary concern here is for his disciples and THEIRprotection. Their lives are his concern. “Protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.” Protect them. Some other translations of this scripture, including the King James Version, use the word “keep” instead of the word “protect.” I think that is a better word actually because “keep” doesn’t just meant protect, but it also implies possession and belonging. If you keep something you hold on to it. Keep emphasizes the fact that these disciples BELONG to God. Their protection is directly linked to the fact that they are God’s treasured possession. Keep them, Jesus says, keep them. Keep them safe; keep them together; keep them in the truth and keep them united to us and to each other. Keep them.
There was a minister in England writing near the end of the 1600s named Matthew Henry who wrote an extensive commentary on the bible. And his comment on this passage is an extension of Jesus’s prayer and plays on this use of the word “keep.”
He writes:
Keep their lives till they have done their work;
keep their comforts, and let them not be broken in upon by the hardships they meet.
Keep their interest in the world, and let it not sink.
Keep them in their integrity, keep them disciples, keep them close to their duty.
Keep them for your name’s sake. Keep them in the knowledge and fear of your name;
keep them in the profession and service of your name, whatever it costs them.
Keep them in the interest of your name, and let them ever be faithful to this.
Keep them in your truths, in your ordinances, in the way of your commandments.
Keep them by your own power, in your own hand;
keep them yourself, undertake for them, let them be your own.
Keep them from evil. Keep them from Satan as a tempter that either he may not have leave to sift them and keep them from him as a destroyer that he may not drive them to despair.
Keep them from the evil of the world and of their tribulation in it.
Keep them. Now those are Matthew Henry’s words; that is his expansion of Jesus’s prayer, but I think his use and repetition of the word “keep” meaning to hold, possess AND protect is really in keeping with (it is holding on to) Jesus’s original prayer and meaning. Keep them. Like a parent tucking their kids in at night, Jesus’s prayer before he leaves his disciples is that God will hold them tight. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to…what? Keep! All at once it means to embrace, to own and to defend. That is what Jesus is asking God to do for these disciples. Keep them God.
And I think that it is important that we recognize and emphasize that the person who is being asked to do something in this prayer here is God. God is the one who is being asked to act. It is God who is being asked to keep, to hold, possess, and protect. It is easy to forget for a moment that Jesus is addressing God in the gospel today. He is so often talking to us. But this is his prayer to God that we are eavesdropping in on. It is so like us humans to always want to take center stage and make everything be about what we do or don’t do; and yeah, I think the things we do in this world matter and there are plenty of scriptures that talk about that, but I don’t think that this scripture is one of them. This scripture is about what God does.
God keeps. God holds on to the people that belong to him. He gives them his word, his joy and his truth. Now God’s people don’t always hold on to God, but God is always willing to hold on to them. God keeps because that is who God is and what God does, but that is in contrast to what the world does. God keeps, but the world casts aside. The world throws away. In the eyes of God human life is precious; in the eyes of the world it is expendable. God keeps, but the world casts aside. God keeps his covenants; the world breaks them. God brings people together; the world drives them apart. God sanctifies truth; the world sanctifies lies. God raises up a human body to glorify it; the world raises up a human body to murder it. God’s ways, and the world’s ways are very different.
Now the Gospel of John is very clear about the fact that God created the world, but it is also clear, right here, that not everything in the world is OF God. There is a difference between God and the world. God keeps, but the world casts aside. But we are OF God. Jesus’s prayer reminds us that we are OF God. Jesus might not be telling us to do anything in this prayer, but his words should affect our actions nonetheless because they remind us of who we are and who we belong to. We belong to God, not the world. We are in the world. God wants us to be in the world. Jesus sends us into the world. There is work for us to do here and there are blessings for us to receive here, but we don’t belong to the world. We belong to God. We belong to a God who keeps.
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