What is Eternal Life?

Acts 1:6-14
Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36
1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11
John 17:1-11



O God, the King of glory, you have exalted your only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven: Do not leave us comfortless, but send us your Holy Spirit to strengthen us, and exalt us to that place where our Savior Christ has gone before; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

In his farewell prayer for us, Jesus asks the Father to give us eternal life. “And this is eternal life,” he explains, “that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”
            When we hear the phrase “eternal life,” we tend to stand gaping and gazing into heaven, just like the disciples did as they watched Jesus rise into the mist on that first Ascension Day. “Eternal life,” must be up there with Jesus in the clouds, we think. It is beyond the Pearly Gates, the place where “pain and suffering will be no more, neither sighing but life everlasting.” We look forward to an Eternal Life, hand in hand with those whom we have loved and lost. We look forward to a changeless realm of light, tucked securely in the strong arms of a loving God, never to be cast away. We think of Eternal Life as something that we must wait for, and pray for, and long for someday, just as we wait and pray and long for Jesus to come back down from the sky.

Certainly, we do look forward to life in God’s presence after death. Certainly, we do look forward to Jesus’ bodily return to us on earth. According to John’s Gospel, though, Jesus tells us today that “Eternal Life” is ours right now in this world, as well. To have Eternal Life is to know God, he says, as God is revealed in Jesus Christ. Now, there are all kinds of knowing. We can “know” that two plus two is four. We can “know” our child’s favorite food. We can “know” the emotions that our friend is feeling after a hard day. And we can “know” one another in love. In John’s Gospel, knowing is the loving, not the intellectual, kind of knowing. To know God is not to know facts about Jesus, or to claim to read God’s mind, or to know in what year the world was created. For John, to know God is to be in relationship with God, just as we are in relationship with one another, just as Jesus is in relationship with the Father. Imagine the Trinity as a big silk parachute. The parachute drifts from the Father to the Son and back again, billowing out on the breath of the Spirit and wrapping around the world. When we enter into relationship with the Trinity, we enter into a complex web of relations, human and divine.

It’s easy to throw a bunch of poetry onto the page as we think about what it means to be in relationship with God. But how does it really work in the nitty gritty of our lives? If you ask me, we have enough trouble brokering our human relationships, without throwing God into the mix. This week, I have kept coming back to two stories of relationship—or lack thereof—that have haunted me as I have thought about our texts.

The first is the story of Elliott Rodger. I wept when I watched the 17-year-old killer in his final video, right before he began his shooting spree in Santa Barbara last week. You might have seen the video on TV or on the Internet.  I don’t want to excuse Elliott’s inexcusable actions, but I was struck by the loneliness and hurt curled like a wounded animal behind his overpowering hatred. In his mental illness, it seemed as if Elliott stood starving behind a Plexiglas window, smelling roast chicken and chocolate cake, watching others feast on a sumptuous meal of love, yet not knowing how to get on the other side of the glass. To top it off, it seems as if he turned to the peculiar web of relationship called the Internet for help, and the Internet led him astray. It counseled him to conflate love with sex. It taught him that human worth can be measured and compared and marketed like meat. Not understanding the true nature of relationship or how to get there, Elliott was obsessed with one thing:  to join the web of love that he saw around him everywhere he looked.

In thinking about Elliott, I thought about how we too often stand unwittingly behind all kinds of screens, as we look hungrily at the heavenly banquet that God prepares and serves, not able to figure out the way inside. In our relating, we twist and turn. We seek out, and we turn our backs. In one moment, we are lifting up our hearts, and in another we are hiding our faces. One day we open wide our minds or our arms, and the next day we pull down thick wooden shutters and turn out the lights. How do we have a relationship with a God who has no back to turn? With a God whose Love is so much deeper than what we can imagine? How do we have a relationship with a God we cannot see, with a Lord who has ascended into heaven and is no longer before our eyes and in reach of our hands? How many of us could make angry videos to God for the lack of loving presence that we feel from our Creator? How many of us are frustrated in our desire for a relationship with God, cursed by our own blindness to his presence? How much of our own understanding of relationship with God is as far from the mark as Elliott’s false beliefs about love?

The other person on my mind this week is 19-century celebrity, Laura Bridgman. I heard about her for the first time on NPR.[1] Long before Helen Keller was born, Laura lost four of her five senses to scarlet fever at the age of two. At age seven, Laura was taken from her family to the Perkins Institute in Boston as a science experiment: to see if a child so profoundly handicapped could be taught, or if she would spend her life isolated in her own wild and lonely world. Through touch, Laura learned relationship. By age 20, living at Perkins, Laura had learned to speak and write so brilliantly that she became famous all over the world. Can you imagine living in a world as isolated and as lonely as Laura’s? You live in totally silent darkness. You cannot express yourself in speech. You cannot taste food or smell your mother’s perfume. Talk about being shut out from the world! Yet, Laura found a relationship with God in Jesus Christ. Despite the teaching of her Deist mentor, who encouraged her to imagine God as a disengaged Creator, this lonely girl found meaning in a personal relationship with God—a God whose Love she knew only as warm, summer sunlight on her skin. Describing her upcoming Baptism, young Laura wrote, “I cannot hear [the pastor’s words] but I shall think of the words of the Savior …. I shall not be afraid.”[2]

On Ascension Day, as we stand rooted on the earth and gaze upward while the only face of God that we know vanishes from our sight, perhaps we are to realize that God’s Love breaks both the barriers that we erect and the barriers with which we are born, by infusing us from within, as our friend Jesus prays for us. Perhaps we know God in God’s loving knowledge of us. “Lord, you have probed me, and you know me,” sings the Psalmist.[3] You are so familiar with all my ways that before I speak even a word, Lord, you know all about it already. . .  If I climb up to heaven, you are there; if I lie down in She’ol, you are there. If I fly away with the wings of the dawn and land beyond the sea, even there your hand would lead me, your right hand would hold me fast.” Perhaps we should rephrase Jesus’ words: “And this is life eternal, that we may know that we are known by You. That we may know You in the words of Jesus, words that penetrate like prayer the walls we erect, words that we then bring to life in others, words that cut through the darkness of our bones like the sunshine.

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[1] A new book recently appeared on Laura Bridgman: What is Visible by Kimberly Elkins. An interview with the author can be found at: http://www.npr.org/2014/05/31/317642173/laura-bridgeman-a-pioneer-50-years-before-helen-keller.

[2]http://books.google.com/books?id=_GsX8DmDAUYC&pg=PT341&lpg=PT341&dq=laura+bridgman%27s+faith&source=bl&ots=HNipzEXalE&sig=1HhaO21kONstQs7FlC9P2yS2vGY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=S-6JU4v-E9ipyASpy4LAAg&ved=0CF8Q6AEwCg#v=onepage&q=laura%20bridgman%27s%20faith&f=false

[3] Psalm 139