Carlos Padilla—Year A Easter 7

Anthony: Let’s transition to our next pericope. It is John 17:1–11. It is a Revised Common Lectionary passage for the seventh Sunday of Easter, May 17.

After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, ² since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. ³ And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. ⁴ I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. ⁵ So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed. ⁶ “I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. ⁷ Now they know that everything you have given me is from you, ⁸ for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you, and they have believed that you sent me. ⁹ I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. ¹⁰ All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I have been glorified in them. ¹¹ And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.

Carlos, I want to give you a chance just to riff on John 17:3. It says, eternal life is knowing God in Jesus Christ. And I’m curious, what are the theological implications and how might it impact the way we talk about salvation?

Carlos: Oh man, this is a huge question. For me, even just studying Karl Barth, what he believes a revelation is. It’s not things we know about God or God, things that God reveals about himself, but rather him disclosing who his whole person is and the person of Jesus.

What does this look like for eternity? Eternal life is knowing him, not knowing things about him, but rather participating in Jesus’ relationship with a Father through the Spirit. And I think when you think of salvation in these terms, it makes it a dynamic living, real salvation.

A lot of us, especially me growing up Catholic and then going to a more of a Protestant mindset, salvation was always about a place and not about a person. And in this person of Christ who’s living active, dynamic, not stagnant, not external, but internal in me having more life than I ever cared for in myself is what actually gives me life.

So, one thing that I’ve repositioned into my thinking when talking about salvation, especially as knowing him is eternal life, is that I don’t believe there is a postponed reality of this salvation. Maybe retirement home in heaven or whatever that looks like after you die.

But what I see in Scripture, what I see in the voice, in the act, in the life of Jesus is this, is that every time somebody tries to postpone some type of salvation or has a better eschatology than he, the living eschatology which he is, he rebukes him or he gets firm.

We can find this when in the Book of John, where Lazarus is dead and the friends are coming up to him saying, “Man, if you would’ve just come, he would’ve survived.” And then Martha comes up and says, “You could have done something.” And Jesus goes, “Would you believe in the resurrection?” And then she gives her the eschatology; she postpones it. She says, yes, I believe in the future resurrection, this. And then Jesus says, I am the resurrection.

And another story. They’re talking about the harvest. And Jesus says, “Oh, you say the harvest is two and three months away. But I say, if you open your eyes, it’s here.” And I think some of the strongest language that Jesus uses is for those who want to postpone salvation to a mere eschatological event in the future, rather than the living, breathing Christ, love personified, God personified in front of him right there.

So, what this means for salvation is that salvation is not a future destination merely, but rather it’s the divine participation. It’s your participation in the life of Christ in the Trinity right now.

Anthony: And what I’m hearing is we have been saved. We are being saved. And we will be saved. And he is the present reality of that.

And that, boy, doesn’t that alleviate some anxiety in life knowing …, because often, again, even with … we were talking about election, salvation gets talked in those terms. Are you in or are you out? But there is a present-day reality to that, which is really beautiful. And it’s an act of participation for sure.

It seems to me, Carlos, that, and I’m hyperlinking back to the TF Torrance quote, that everything hinges on the mutual love and shared glory we see between the Father and the Son. Is that the case? And how is prayer a participation in that love relationship of Father and Son?

Carlos: Okay, this is one thing I struggle with. And actually, my PhD title’s going to be around Karl Barth and “Our Father.” And more so, because I believe, like what Paul says, like, we don’t know how to pray. We pray as we not ought to. And then Jesus comes in real time in the middle of people who do know how to pray, who have been praying for centuries, the Shema, all these different things. And Jesus interrupts that reality and says, “This is how you pray.” And he starts with the first words, “Our Father.”

And this is so groundbreaking because no one up until this point has ever tried to relate to God as a Father, as a relational aspect. It’s always some external deistic figure behind the clouds, behind Mars, who you have to beg in order to have relationship, to bless you, to bless your crops, X, Y, Z, et cetera.

So, I think how it addresses prayer is that Jesus comes as a living crisis. And like, as we said and TF Torrance has called this, the Vicarious Man. And I think part of this vicarious living that Jesus does for us is in prayer as well, and even especially in the “Our Father.”

So, as we’ve seen, that “Our Father,” the first verse, “Our Father who art in heaven,” there’s a crisis here. When Jesus starts praying this in front of the people, they’re like, what do you mean this guy’s your Father? And this creates a crisis. And Jesus Christ is a living crisis, a restorative crisis. And in this mode where Jesus prays, he’s praying not only for mankind, but on behalf of mankind, because our alienated minds cannot fathom to see God as a Father.

So how does this change prayer? Because Jesus acts as a fulfillment and the contradiction at the same time. He fulfills a prayer that we can’t pray. We’re not able to call God Father because we’re so trapped in our legalistic transaction, federal, judicial mindset about how we should relate with God.

But at the end of the day, too, he reveals that it’s a living, a relationship, a family agenda, and he reveals that if God wanted anything other than a family, he wouldn’t have asked us to call him Father.

Anthony: Thanks be to God, that we have a great high priest who understands, who mediates, who knows what we need, and in relationship with the Spirit even goes beyond the words that we can speak, to pray the true heart, you know, that we, our true selves are hidden in his life. Amen.