“I see trees of green, red roses too, I see
them bloom for me and for you, and I think to myself, what a wonderful world.”
I apologise for my bad singing! But I’m sure you all
recognise the song – it’s perhaps best known sung by Louis Armstrong. And it’s
true isn’t it - we all know what a truly wonderful world God has made for us to
live in - a veritable Garden of Eden, if only we would learn to look after it
and use it rightly.
St John uses the Greek word ‘kosmos’, meaning ‘world’,
no less than 13 times in today’s reading from his Gospel (John 17:6-19). But
this is not the beautiful material world which God made and saw ‘was very good’,
as the 1st chapter of Genesis puts it. I shall call what John has in
mind the kosmos-world, to distinguish it from God’s world. The kosmos-world is
a place of spiritual death, filled with souls cut off from God: a place where
greedy people trample on each other to grab more for themselves; a place where
violent people kill and torture other people; a place where cynical people
despise what is good and true and beautiful. And we all know the reality of
that kosmos-world too, don’t we!
For John the very opposite of the kosmos-world is
eternal life, as he tells us in the preceding verses, ‘This is eternal life, (to) know you the only
true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent’. And it is echoed in
today’s reading from 1 John 5:9-13, ‘This is the testimony: God gave us eternal life, and this
life is in his Son’.
In the Gospel reading, Jesus prays to his Father for his disciples.
It is the night of the last supper, after he has
washed the disciples’ feet. It is immediately before he goes out with them to the
garden of Gethsemane, across the Kidron valley, where he will be arrested by soldiers
and police led by Judas Iscariot. Jesus is praying for his disciples, but he is
also teaching them, for he prays out loud in their hearing. His words are dense
with meaning - perhaps because he knows this is his last opportunity to speak
to them before he is arrested, tried and executed.
It would take a very long sermon to tease out all the
nuances of his prayer. So I shall pick out just three points about the
relationship between Jesus’s disciples and John’s kosmos-world.
1. Jesus’s disciples are in
the kosmos-world, but they do not belong
to it. God has given the disciples to Jesus, in the sense that God has made them
able to respond to the word of God which Jesus has given them. They have been
brought to know and believe the truth that Jesus is sent from God. That is what
sets them apart from the kosmos-world, even while they remain in it.
2. The kosmos-world has already shown it hates Jesus’s disciples because they do not belong to it.
Those mired in evil, in cynicism, violence and greed, cannot co-exist with
those who live by God’s values. So Jesus calls on his Father to protect his
disciples from evil, when he is no longer there to do so in the flesh.
3. Jesus does not ask God to take his disciples out of the kosmos-world. Just as God sent Jesus into the
kosmos-world, so Jesus sends his disciples into it. God sent Jesus to redeem
the kosmos-world from within. Jesus sends his disciples to continue his
redeeming work in the kosmos-world.
The kosmos-world is a metaphor for the evil we encounter all around us,
day by day.
It’s hard to see evil for what it is in the abstract.
It comes in so many disguises. I think it helps to focus on concrete examples. There
are so many to choose from - but let’s focus today on the hatred people harbour
in their hearts for others they see as different from themselves, or as
opponents.
Personal hatred wounds the soul of both the hater and
the hated. These days it is often expressed anonymously on social media, as those
of us who use it know only too well. Children are particularly vulnerable to
online bullying, whether it is aimed at their body form or their sexuality or
some other perceived weakness. Vulnerable adults can also be severely affected.
It blights lives and in extreme cases leads to suicide.
We may think that we cannot be guilty of such hateful
behaviour - but what about old fashioned gossip? How many of us can say that we
have not been party to passing on rumours that damage other people?
Hatred of one group for another on the grounds of race
or religion is even more damaging than personal hatred. Such group hatreds are
evil. They have been with us since the dawn of the human species, a kind of
original sin, to which we are all potentially vulnerable. They fracture
communities. And in the extreme they have led perfectly ordinary people, not so
very different to you or me, to attempt to exterminate whole populations seen
as dangerous enemies.
The Nazis murdered 6 million Jews between 1941 and
1945, alongside innumerable Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals. My
father as an army chaplain was taken to see one of the extermination camps
after its liberation, and he made sure that as a teenager I saw the horrific
movies taken at the time so that I would recognise evil when I saw it.
We do well to remember this Holocaust every year in
January. But that has not been enough to stop other genocides in my lifetime, such
as those in Ruanda and in Bosnia.
Understandably, surviving Jews sought to establish a
safe homeland for themselves. But tragically 700,000 Palestinians were driven
from their homes when the state of Israel was founded in 1948, an event they
remember as the Nakba or catastrophe, the root of much of the violence in the
middle east today. One group hatred begets another, in a vicious circle of
evil.
Lest we think that we cannot be caught up in such
events, let us reflect on the cycle of violence in the North of our island. The
Good Friday Agreement was meant to break the cycle, and we have had peace there
for many years. But the hatreds still fester. And let us also reflect on the
continuing prejudice in our communities against Travellers.
So to sum up:
The wonderful world God has placed us in is good. We
should rejoice in it and give thanks for it. But as Jesus’s disciples, we must always
be on guard against the evil that spoils it.
As disciples we live amidst evil, but we do not belong
to it, because God has given us to Jesus.
Jesus confronted evil and refused to collude with it
at the cost of his death on the cross, from which God raised him up.
Our task as disciples is to continue Jesus’s redeeming
mission. God has set us apart to confront and defeat evil wherever it is found,
and that includes evil hatreds, what ever that may cost us personally.
We can and should take comfort that Jesus intercedes
for us, asking God to protect us from something much worse than suffering – that
is, from being drawn into evil ourselves.
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