“Holy Father, keep through Thine own name those whom Thou hast given me,

that they may be one, as we are.”

(John 17:11)

A mother abandoned her mentally retarded son at the airport. She ripped off all the labels out of his clothing, put a few pennies in his pants pocket, and leaving him there alone, she flew back to her home in a distant city.

A nineteen-year-old boy, who had just been dismissed from college for frivolous neglect of his responsibilities, with deep shame confessed to his parents: “I almost didn’t come home. But there seemed to be just two other things to do: join the army, or commit suicide.”

Poor distraught woman — lonely, defeated young man — we know how they must have felt! How many times we’ve wanted to do something desperate because of our toughest assignments, our insoluble problems, our unbearable burdens! And why didn’t we? Oh, we might have, had we not doubted that the relief secured for our aching spirit might not be satisfaction enough to make up for the peace of mind we might forfeit.

It is because of this ever threatening human condition that the Church of Jesus Christ must keep on turning to that prayer of our Lord which He prayed on the night before He was crucified. He was praying to His Father about His disciples and the world in which He was leaving them to witness and work for His kingdom. He had come to the end of His earthly ministry. On His heart was the future destiny of those dear to Him, and the cause for which He was laying down His life. What would happen to them and the mission to which He had called them?

When we are at our wits’ end, our Lord shows us the way for us to go. In His high-priestly prayer He prays: “Holy Father, keep through Thine own name those whom Thou has given Me, that they may be one as we are.” Oh, how we need to focus on those three words: “Holy”, and “name”, and “one”!

First, that word “Holy”: Our Lord in His hour of desperation addressed that One to whom He prayed as “Holy Father.” Do we know what “Holy” means? Ordinarily we think of Holiness as meaning “moral perfection,” “unstained purity.” When we think this way about holiness we are under the spell of the prophet’s vision of God in Isaiah 6 when he heard the choirs of angels singing: “Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord God of Hosts,” and His immediate human reaction to the vision was to cry: “Woe is me, for I am undone. I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.”

But the fundamental Biblical meaning of “holiness” is not “purity,” or “righteousness,” or “moral perfection,” though that is part of it. Rather, the root meaning of “holiness” is “separateness,” the vast and immeasurable distinction between God and God’s earthly children. Rudolph Otto described the Biblical idea of the holy as two words: “Wholly Other.” John Chrysostom’s “incomprehensibility of God,” or Herbert Farmer’s “the Godness of God” are attempts at describing the Biblical ideas in the “Holiness of God.” That inexhaustibleness of the divine nature, before all our human probing; that fullness that still remains after our most ambitious and energetic explorations have exhausted themselves — that vast continent that stretches on and on, unexplored and unmapped — this phenomenon of the spiritual world, the Bible calls “the Holiness of God.”

It is to the Wholly Other — the Holy Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, that we must look in all our perplexity, frustrations, and despair over our unbearable personal burdens and our insoluble world problems, whatever they are.

When the Von Trapp family were fleeing Austria in The Sound of Music, you will remember, it seemed impossible that they could escape their Nazi pursuers, but the Mother Superior whispered to Maria: “Remember the words of the Psalmist: ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills. Whence cometh my help? My help cometh from the Lord who made heaven and earth.’”

Notice also that word “name” Jesus prays: “Holy Father, keep through Thine own name those whom Thou has given me.” Jesus in praying for His disciples then, asked not that they be taken out of the world’s misery and trouble, but rather that they be kept in the world through “God’s holy name.” Would He have us ask ourselves less in the world today?

The Mother Superior told Maria that the Abbey was not a place for people to run to and hide to get away from their problems and burdens. Rather they must learn through the teaching and fellowship of the Abbey how to climb every mountain and cross every stream in the pursuit of their dream. And in that spirit she sent Maria back out into the world.

It is always a profanation of our holy religion for anyone of us to enter the church in an attempt to escape from the world; to embrace a faith which shuts out the world’s problems; to seek a spiritual solace which will permit us to lay our burdens down.

Jesus prays for His own that the Holy Father will keep them through “God’s Holy Name” in the world, not take them out of it. “Name” means “nature” or “character” in the Middle East psychology. And this “nature” or “character” of God, as Jesus is here emphasizing it, is “God’s Holiness.”

But there is a third word: the small, basic word “one”. Jesus prays for His disciples: “Holy Father, keep through Thine own name those whom Thou has given me, that they may be one, as we are one.” Finally, in His prayer, Jesus is asking that His disciples in every situation that confronts them in the world should stand fast together as one, just as the Father and the Son are one. What is the nature of this unity, or the oneness of the Father and the Son?

The High-Priestly prayer of our Lord is very instructive on the existential nature of the “Holiness of God” — this incomprehensibleness of God. For our Lord’s words clearly reveal that it is His death, so soon to take place upon the cross, which will reveal the glory of this “wholly other” aspect of God’s nature.

Listen to the words of His prayer: “Father, the hour is come; glorify Thy Son that Thy Son may glorify Thee… And now, O Father, glorify Thou me with Thine own self with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was.” (John 17:1, 5)

Whatever glory that the Father and the Son had in common, it meets and glows in sweet, sad union on the cross.

It is perfectly apparent to everyone that something has gone wrong with the world of human beings: with that abandoned mentally retarded child and his frantic mother at the airport — with that desperate youth flunking out of college — with us and our shirked responsibilities, our broken promises, our greed and selfishness.

What’s wrong with our world of persons? Fundamentally, says Herbert Farmer, what’s wrong is that we will not acknowledge the claims upon us of God and other people — the claims that are built into this world of persons. So, God in Christ takes the responsibilities of all those rejected claims upon himself. In what William Temple called “the unlimited self-sacrifice of love,” Christ went to the cross acknowledging the claim on him even of an unknown and unworthy thief who was dying from the just penalty of his crimes.

This is a revelation of the heart of the “Holiness of God,” which is so far from our corrupt human nature, wholly other than our unregenerate humanity, and yet just what our doomed world needs to save it.

Small wonder that the young Queen Victoria, though “she had been instructed on her first appearance for the rendition of Handel’s Messiah: that she, the Queen, was not to stand with all the others at the singing of The Hallelujah Chorus — nevertheless, Victoria sat uneasily and listened, as the music mounted in volume like waves of the sea, then as the words, ‘King of Kings and Lord of Lords,’ the young Queen stood up before them all with her head bowed.” (Paul Scherer — Event in Eternity — p. 181-2)

Yes, it is “From the throne of His cross that the King of grief cries out to the world of unbelief.” The cross plumbs the depths fleetingly of the “Holiness of God” and brings back the photostatic prints of this oneness, this imperishable togetherness of the glory of the Father and the Son — this unlimited self-sacrifice of love and obedience to discharge the vast claims of our inter-personal world, which the world so largely has rejected.

“So He reigns –” wrote Sir John Stainer in his oratorio, The Crucifixion:

“He reigns, King ever glorious.

(O Christ)

Thou are sublime

Far more awful in Thy weakness,

More than kingly in Thy meekness,

Thou Son of God.

Glory and honor,

Let the world divide and take them;

Crown its monarchs and unmake them:

But Thou wilt reign.”

 

PASTORAL PRAYER

Our Father who art in Heaven, we believe that Jesus Christ Thy Son, our Lord, spoke the truth about Thy constant, loving concern for our welfare. We want to believe that we can rely upon Thy faithfulness to provide generously for all our physical and spiritual needs. But we grow anxious about many things: when our income does not cover our expenditures, when illness and the relentless encroachments of time steal away our strength, and when our burdens become too heavy for us to bear. Lord, increase our faith, that serenity of spirit and peace of mind may possess our souls.

Hear us, O God, as we pray our prayers: prayers of thanksgiving for all Thy past mercies; and prayers of petition for future blessings:

            For strength to perform our labors;

            For patience in dealing with people and problems that tease and vex us;

            For rescue and healing and comfort for Thy people battered by life’s storms.

We pray for our nation, Lord, and for our President and his colleagues, and all who have responsibility to govern in our time. Good Lord, save us from the greed that makes inordinate demands on others; from the folly of supposing that anyone of us, or group of us, is indispensable to Thee or to our fellow men and women. Save us from leaders in business and government who with specious arguments persuade us to pursue unworthy goals and wreck the well-being of the hopes of others.

Help us, Lord, to make the most of this good life entrusted to us by Thy grace, day by day. Loving, kind, and considerate; unselfish and generous; obedient and loyal may we always be to Thee and those Thou has given us to love and serve, through Jesus Christ Our Savior. Amen.