Seventh Sunday of Easter | John 17:1-11
As a child I watched magicians on television. Well, magicians, and other folks like them who performed tricks of legerdemain. There were standard tricks—the disappearing lady, things in hats, impossible numbers of plates spinning on implausibly thin poles. Then there were the rings, the metal circles, clearly solid, solidly linking, joining and rejoining into chains.
John talks in a circle. It’s a trait that is apparent even on a casual reading of this Gospel. The story, and the language that tells it, loops back upon itself, circling, always circling, and nowhere more than in chapters 14-17, the farewell discourse of Jesus with his followers, passages John places in the narrative just before the arrest and crucifixion. Chapter 17 itself is one long prayer.
You have given him authority over all… to give eternal life to all… and this is eternal life, that they may know you…
I have glorified you,… now Father glorify me… All mine are yours and yours are mine and I am glorified in them…
And finally: …that they may be one, as we are one.
In this Gospel, everything is connected—God as Father, God as Jesus, all of us—everything is made one, touching, containing, interconnecting, rings within rings.
Each link of a chain is a separate thing, an entity in itself, a ring without beginning or end; a link can be positioned so as not to touch the rings passing through it. Nevertheless, each ring is itself part of the greater chain, whether a particular link is aware of it or not. In John’s Gospel, the ends of the chain loop back, a circle made of circles, and for this Gospel, unbreakable.
We might reflect on a single link in an unbreakable chain, which is our own place in John’s view—part of a chain, part of the circle, part of a living vine. We might be held in a perfect position so as to touch nothing. We may not feel the embrace of any other link—the world may pass by us, through us, touching nothing. Though we feel nothing, still the other links pass within us, encircling us, holding us. Nothing can remove them. Nothing can separate us.
There are some chains that enslave us, chains that weigh us down, rattling and dragging behind us, chains of our own making, like Marley in Charles Dickens, or chains made by human hands, by human slavers, to trade and profit from human misery. Then there is this chain, weightless, unseen, that binds nothing but itself, connecting us to God, to all that is good, to one another—this chain is not what we wear, it is who we are.
Embracing God, we realize that God already embraces us.