“And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”

We near the conclusion of our Long Goodbye in this Holy Week, before we observe the Good Friday liturgy and read the account of Jesus’ arrest, trial, crucifixion, and burial. And then tomorrow endure the silence and emptiness of Holy Saturday.

In the gospel of John, Jesus does his most memorable teaching not on the mountain or on the plain or in the synagogue, but at the table with his friends, in the meal he shares with them before the Passover. We celebrated this table last night in the Maundy Thursday liturgy: “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” He washed and wiped and loved and laid down his life and sent Judas out into the night.

And after the footwashing, in the sequence on the pages of the gospel of John, Jesus stays at the table and teaches them in John chapters 14, 15, and 16. We read these familiar passages on Sundays of Easter, as though they are spoken by the risen Jesus: “Love one another as I have loved you, I am the vine you are the branches, I am the way the truth and the life.”

His long goodbye is his last will and testament, when like Moses does in the book of Deuteronomy, like a leader, a prophet, a patriarch, with this children, his heirs, (or his graduate students) gathered around his bed, Jesus teaches them everything he wants them to remember. They remember it more vividly because they were his last. These chapters are really part of Jesus’ “Even Longer Goodbye” to those who will carry on.

But let’s populate this table – give it color and texture with our sacramental imagination.

I imagine that at this table …. are all the ones Jesus has loved throughout the gospel (John doesn’t restrict the number of the disciples to 12)  — the missionary woman from Samaria he met at the well, Nicodemus on his way to being born from above, Mary and Martha of Bethany, Lazarus, the one he called back from the tomb, his mother, and the anonymous disciple whom he loved – all these and more…

They are going to miss Jesus, the way we each miss those we have lost to death. We hear this agony expressed in Mary and Martha’s grief at the death of Lazarus their brother and Jesus’ friend.  They will miss the sound of their loved one’s voice, the warm nearness of their bodies, the taste of the food and the fragrance shared.

And perhaps Jesus will, as we will as our death approaches, miss the salt sea and the laughter of children…. as we would miss holding the hand of our spouse, embracing our children… glimpsing the first light of the sun at dawn… tasting the sweet juice of the grapes… breathing the scent of spring.

But this loss is not what Jesus speaks of now. He concludes his long goodbye with a prayer. A prayer to God, the Father. He prays on behalf of those gathered at the table and for us / those who hear it today.

Jesus looks into heaven, and he speaks to God. We hear the first five verses in our reading.

The prayer is long. It’s passionate and poignant, supremely confident, authoritative, personal, conveying the character of Jesus as we have known it throughout the gospel.

For generations people of faith have heard in this prayer what Jesus most wanted for his friends, for the beloved community, for what we now call “church.” after he was gone.

Time is collapsed.

The prayer is about the future. It’s about the work he is about to do with Pilate and the cross in the garden.

And it’s about the past –  “I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do.”

Jesus refers to it all as finished even before the story has told us about the cross and his (really) last words.

It speaks of what the friends will face in the future, be scattered, be threatened by the evil one, be always challenged by a hostile world which “hates” them.

It asks God to do what they have known that God indeed to have done: protected them from the evil one, and left them to live together in the world with the ongoing presence and knowledge of Jesus through the teaching of the Holy Spirit and through his flesh and blood, made them to be “one.”

We hear this prayer, and it gives us the key to the door of the passion narrative we will hear in the next hour. It’s the same key that scripture has been telling us in the readings all week.

Jesus, this rabbi we know in Galilee and Judea, whose mighty works and signs we have witnessed on the water and in the desert, by the pool, in the village—-he comes from a time before time, when the Spirit hovered over the face of the deep.

He was one with God and with God. He enjoyed the presence of the Father “before the world existed.”

Because God so loved the world, He became flesh, entered into human life, set up his tent, tabernacled among us, lived, dwelt among us.

And now He’s getting ready to return, to depart from the people he loves and the landscape he knows.

He’ll be all right.

It’s those he leaves behind, making our way in the world of …. mortality… division… conflict.. violence…

It is us that he cares about now and for whom he fervently prays at this moment.

From where we stand today, I think this prayer of Jesus has a tragic dimension. Those who have faith in Christ have not been one, but have but have split and schismed, fractured and fought one another.

And also the sad truth that those for whom he prayed to be protected from evil, the community of those he loved, that community of Christians, of people of LOVE, has in its later generations inflicted harm in the name of Jesus. They have heard Jesus’ prayer for them as excluding, denying divine presence to those who have not become part of this fellowship.

We hear it most poignantly and pointedly in the polemic against the Jews (in the readings that has infiltrated our Holy Week liturgies and that has sown violence and hatred in the name of the one who loves us.)

So in our prayer today, for the ways that hatred and exclusion has overwhelmed love, we repent. For those who have been harmed, we lament on this holiest of days

It is for us who embrace the story of Jesus who loved the world and who became one with it, to gather all people into a world where we can live together. Perhaps wider and more diverse than Jesus imagines in this prayer.

In the liturgy to come, we will hear the details of the hour when in John’s words, the Father will glorify the Son.

We hear it as a human goodbye, physical pain, institutional evil,  political execution – at the same time we know it to be the work of God completed, and Jesus’ return to the presence of his Father.

And we know that its ultimate motivation is love, its ultimate gift, is life. Eternal Life –

With the gift of eternal life, we are freed from fear of the finality of death.  Glory radiates in the flesh of Jesus. And flesh, every human friendship, in laughter, in sunlight, in shared food and fragrance, eternal life shines.

“And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”

Amen.