Not Belonging

Generally people do not deal well with anyone that does not belong to their group, nor anything that is part of their value system. If individuals within that collective start to think outside the box, or try to understand those who don't belong, their leadership gets antsy and work doubly hard to reinforce an us versus them mentality within the group.

Jesus had come among us to proclaim something very alien to the established order. In a world ruled by entropy (sin, corruption, and death), Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom of God, a state where a living relationship with the eternal, living God existed and where sin, corruption, and death had no place. Winner take all? No, love your neighbour and do good to them that hate you? Survival of the fittest? No, look out and help the poor, the oppressed, and the needy. This was counter to every system out there, geared to the protection of privilege, to the maintaining of the status quo, no matter how fractured or unjust it would be.

While among us, Jesus gathered followers, disciples who were tasked to learn about the Kingdom from Him and to go out and proclaim it. The established order feared and hated Him and this message, and so tried to eliminate Him, but in so doing irreversibly weakening, even destroying its stranglehold on humanity and the cosmos. The established order therefore fears and hates His followers and disciples, people who stand for the message of the Kingdom of God and threatens the hold sin, corruption, and death hold on all things. Just as the World, as it has come to be called, tried to subvert Him and then eliminate Him, so it has turned its attention on His followers.

The biggest risk to His followers is not so much physical. He had shown in the Resurrection that a physical death is temporary only and that new Life was offered to all who would follow Him. No, the biggest risk would be that the World would draw His followers away and deny them the Life of the Kingdom of God. While among His followers, Our Lord would protect them from the Enemy, but once He ascended to dwell with the Father the implication is that His followers would be exposed.

Our Lord, though He is God, still prays to the Father. Such is the mystery of the inner workings of the Trinity that the other two Persons, the Son and the Spirit, pray to the Father constantly. Our Lord prays that His followers be protected from the Enemy, that none who would seek Him and the Kingdom of God would be lost to the Enemy's grip. That is the message of today's Gospel selection (Jn. 17.6-19), that Our Lord prays that while not physically present among us that we who have thrown our lot in with Him still find protection from the Enemy's worst.

That prayer would be realized fifty days after the Resurrection, when another Person of the Most Holy and Glorious Trinity would rewrite the playbook that the World thought it had. If God is for us, who can be against us? We followers may no longer belong. We followers may be hated by the old order. We followers, however, belong now to someone greater, Who has overcome.