BECAUSE YOU ARE MINE

John 17:1-11

Irenaeus of Lyons once said:

“The glory of God is the human person fully alive.”

What does it mean to be glorified? It is a good question to ask ourselves as we come down the stretch of these fifty days of Easter when we hear so much about glorification, the glory of God, and the glorious resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ 

The prayer that we hear from Jesus in the book of John is one of many that I hold close to my heart as a follower of Jesus. He speaks of the glory of God and of being glorified by God. The second half of the prayer is more personal and intimate for us. Jesus’ love and concern for us is palpable. It is a prayer to God on our behalf – for our safe-keeping and care. It is a prayer of assurance to God that we have learned well the lessons he was sent to teach. He makes the case that we are worthy.

Then Jesus says something that we should really stop and consider. He says, “All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them.” He does not say he has been glorified for us. He says he has been glorified in us – that his glory is our glory – that his glorification lives in us and through us. To be clear, we glorify God and we glorify Jesus as the Lord of our lives. But it is also true that we are created in God’s image – the Imago Dei. We are indeed heirs to the Kingdom of God that is, as Jesus teaches, within each of us. The language is that of divine union where there is no separation, not between God and Jesus, not between God and humans, not between humans and other humans.

So, how can we comprehend the truth that the Glory of God in Jesus is also in us? For answers we can look to the teachings of Jesus and how those teachings were reflected in how he lived his life.

When Jesus was asked about the greatest commandment in both the Gospels of Mark and Matthew his response was that we should love the Lord our God with everything we have – with all our heart, our soul, our mind, and our strength. He goes on to say that the second and equally important commandment is to love our neighbor as ourselves. Then, when queried about who is our neighbor in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan which illustrates that the caring neighbor is someone we might least expect.

The clearest example of loving our neighbor may have come in Matthew 25: 35-45 when Jesus says that we are to feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, care for the sick, and visit the prisoner, all of these who are his family, and in doing so we are doing it for him.

No matter where we are from or where we have been; no matter what we have done or had done to us; no one is beyond the love and grace of God. We are loved by God simply because we were born. It is in this inherent beloved nature that the glory of God we see in Jesus is realized in us.

In our Baptismal Covenant as Episcopalians, we vow to proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ; to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves; to strive for justice and peace among all people; and to respect the dignity of every human being. It is in these acts of love, justice, dignity, and peace that the human person is fully alive. This is how the glory of God expressed in the person of Jesus becomes conveyed through us. And this is how we engage in beloved community where no one is left standing outside the circle of God’s grace and every person can know truly and deeply that they are loved by God.  

There are many people who feel as though they stand outside the circle of love – many who have an aching longing to feel they belong inside the circle of love – many who long for a sense of God’s love in their lives.

I want to close with a short story. It is a story about a poor sharecropper and his family somewhere in the south. The family was so poor that they did not own a mirror. So, of course even though he and his wife and children knew how each other looked, they did not know how they looked themselves because none of them had ever looked in a mirror before.

So, one day there was a storm, and the man helped the family next door save their crop, and as a way of thanking him, the neighbor gave the man the gift of a mirror for him and his family. And because they were so poor they were not used to gifts, and the man ran home excited with the gift and gathering the family together and they ripped open the plain brown wrapping and for the first time he looked into a mirror.

And the man thought to himself, God, what a handsome man!

And then he passed the mirror to his wife, and she too looked into the mirror for the first time. And as we might expect, she kind of straightened her hair and smiled, and even maybe blushed a little bit, as she too realized for the very first time that she was very, very beautiful.

And then she passed the mirror to her young seventeen-year-old daughter and she too for the first time looked into the mirror and she saw that she was very, very beautiful. And she understood for the first time why every time they went to town the boys went a little crazy.

Then a moment of sadness came as they passed the mirror to the thirteen-year-old son. He too, for the first time, saw himself in the mirror. And because he was kicked in the face by a cow one morning as a little boy and broken many of the bones in his face, and because they were poor, they could not afford doctors and surgeons. And each year his face got more twisted

and more gnarled

and more homely.

And he looked into the mirror and for the first time he saw what he looked like.   

And he began to cry.

He looked at his mother, his father, and his sister and they were all so beautiful.

And he said,

“How could you love me?”

"I’m so very, very ugly."

And his mother did what we hoped a good parent would do. She walked over and embraced him tightly, and said very simply, “I love you simply because you are mine.”

There may be many of us here that have stood in front of a mirror and judged ourselves as unworthy.

“God, how can you love me? I am so very, very ugly. But know this: the one who stands with you in that mirror and who cries with you is a God that says again and again “I love you simply because you are mine.”

God Bless us all. 

Brother Dennis