The Hour has Come

 

John 17:1-11

Eater 7 / Year A

Jesus looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come…” ^{John 17:1} 

The word hour appears seventeen times in John’s gospel.  Early in his ministry Jesus says, “My hour has not yet come.”  Sometime later his enemies attempt to seize him, but John tells us they fail because Jesus’ “hour had not yet come.”  As he travels to Jerusalem for the Passover, Jesus begins to say, “the hour is coming.”  And then today, at the Last Supper, he says, “The hour has come.”

“The hour has come.”  This phrase feels much more consequential than, say, “It’s time to go.”  It feels more like a meeting with destiny than, say, moving on to the next item of an agenda.  If you are running errands and the children are getting restless, you might say, “We only have two more stops before we can head home.”  You don’t say, “The hour has not yet come so our work must continue.”

“The hour has come.”  I am confident you can name experiences in your life when you had a sense of the weightiness of the hour at hand.  I have.  College graduation, for example.  I sensed I had achieved something significant, but at the same time I knew it was the end of a life I loved.  Another time… I was married in Cleveland, OH on a cold day in January.  That morning I went for a swim in hotel pool (yes, it was indoors).  I remember how surreal it felt to be swimming in the dead of winter on my wedding day.  How odd, I thought, to be doing something like this when the hour of one of the most significant moments in my life was so close at hand.

The bible has two distinct words we translate simply as time.  One is chronos, the time we measure in seconds, minutes, hours, and days.  When someone asks how long it takes to drive from point A to point B, they are asking about what chronos describes.  The other word is kairos, which refers to the meaning and the significance of the moment.  Say you pay off your mortgage.  When you have the deed in hand, if you say, “This has been a long time coming”, you are not referring the 360 months of payments.  You are talking about reaching one of life’s great milestones.  The bible uses the word kairos to describe such a moment.

Biblical scholars tell us that for Jesus the kairos hour refers to the climactic moment in his earthly mission, the threefold event of his death, resurrection, and ascension.  These are not three separate times of chronos, but a single act Jesus refers to as his “glorification.”  In today’s reading, he says the hour has come for him to be glorified.  For him, this kairos has three distinct parts:

·     The death of his life as it had been.

·     A resurrection opening a door to something beyond what was lost.

·     An ascension to a new life; a life not possible without the death of what had been before.

I felt this pattern very keenly when I left home to go to seminary.  I sensed all I was giving up – friendships, my home parish, the physical surroundings of where I grew up – and knew even if I went back it would never be the same because I would never be the same.  And then three years later the pattern returned as I graduated from seminary and the life I had grown to love but would no longer have.  Each was an experience of the hour has come.  Each began with a kind of death. 

And yet, as Jesus knew, each death is not a stand-alone moment, but part of a larger process which also includes resurrection and ascension.  Yes, death involves dying and dying means loss and loss gives rise to grief.  And then, in the tomb of grief, there sounds the triumphant call to resurrection.  It may be like a burst of light or it may be like the first hint of dawn after a long, cold night of darkness, but either as in a flash or through a gradual process resurrection happens.  Finally, there comes ascension, the embracing of a new life now possible only because you died to what had been. 

Mary Oliver writes this in her poem In Blackwater Woods:

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.

C.S. Lewis wrote to a dying friend, “There are far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”  While I think this is true about the “hour of our death”, it does not always hold true for some of the devastating, unnecessary losses we suffer, the losses so painful we would gladly trade what life comes after it if we could only have again what was… but life doesn’t work that way, does it.  About them I might amend what C.S. Lewis wrote like this: “There are far better things ahead than what you will ever experience if you stay in the grave of your loss.” 

Our first experience of death comes at the moment we are born.  When we leave the womb we leave behind a warm, enveloping, nurturing world through a brief but painful and traumatic process.  We emerge into a world where the air is too cold, the lights are too bright, and the sounds are too shrill.  And then someone smacks us on the fanny and we cry for the first time.  You and I both know it will not be the last.  Who would ever voluntarily leave the womb for a world like this!  And yet, can you even begin to imagine what life would be like if you never left your fetal home! 

One of the reasons we walk with Jesus through Holy Week is so we can learn how to die to the life we love.  One of the reasons we step out of the tomb with him on Easter morning is to remind us death and loss never get the last word.  And one of the reasons we gather on the mountain with him and watch him ascend into the heavens is to learn how to embrace the wonder of what will be, not just in the next world, but also in the here and now.

Love your life, hold it close, and when the hour comes, let it go.  Let it go.  And when you let it go, keep in mind what Tom Hanks said at the end of the movie Castaway, you never know what the next tide is going to bring in.  But know this, it is bringing something.  All you have to do is open our heart to it.