One of my seminary Bible professors used to say that reading the apostle Paul’s letters is like listening to one end of a phone conversation. We can hear what Paul is saying to the early churches, but we can’t hear what the churches are saying back. Reading a Pauline letter makes you itch to know just what naughty things those Corinthians were doing. What we primarily hear, though, is Paul scolding them.
Listening to Jesus’s prayer to God the Father is quite a different experience. It’s more like listening in on a phone conversation from somewhere else in the house. You quietly pick up the phone in the guest bedroom, and you hear everything your mother is saying to your father who is traveling out of town. And you hear your father’s response. Your mother tells of your recent poor behavior, and your father demands that you should be grounded for a week.
Yet even this analogy is not quite accurate. Slyly listening in on a conversation via an extra phone involves hearing something you’re not meant to hear. The fact that you want to listen in secretly is perhaps proof enough that you’re in trouble and that you shouldn’t be listening in after all. But listening in on Jesus’s prayer to his heavenly Father is hearing exactly what we are intended to hear.
Jesus’s prayer to the Father feels like a monologue, but it’s really a conversation directed to the ears of Jesus’s disciples, even if we don’t hear God the Father’s response. When we are handed the phone to listen in on this prayer, Jesus is at table with his friends on the eve of his death. He has washed their feet. He has offered a long farewell discourse, explaining in lofty language what is about to transpire. And without missing a beat, he begins to pray to his Father in the hearing of his disciples. He wants them to hear what he says. And we are also meant to hear what he says.
Listening in on this prayerful conversation somehow feels as if we are eavesdropping. It seems odd that we are meant to hear the surprising content of Jesus’s prayer. The Father has had a plan for us from before the foundation of the world. Jesus’s work now depends on us. Indeed, he has said that we will do greater things than he has done. He has said that partaking of real, selfless, cross-shaped love is possible even for us. Indeed, unity of purpose and will is also possible for us. And if we can show such unity in our lives—if others can taste, smell, see, hear, and touch this oneness of mission—perhaps they, too, will believe in the power of Jesus, who was sent by the Father. Jesus’s conversation with the Father is still alive, and it’s up to us to invite others to listen to it.
But if this conversation seems strange to us, it’s a testament to how strange its language has become to our modern ears. Love and unity sound like vague concepts because we so rarely see this kind of love and unity realized in the flesh. Maybe we can’t hear this conversation because our fingers are in our ears. Or are we too self-consumed? Maybe we can’t understand the self-giving love of Father and Son because our society puts too much love in material things over love of God and neighbor. After such a week as this one, shouldn’t we identify what is keeping us from knowing concrete love and unity? What do we really love? Has our fear of losing our rights or our guns surpassed our love of God and neighbor? Did Jesus ever tell us that love wouldn’t require some sort of sacrifice? Because if our desire to hold onto something is so great that we’re willing to tolerate one more needless massacre of our brothers and sisters, then it’s clear that we are listening in on the wrong conversation. We are, in fact, listening to no conversation at all.
Jesus’s prayer often gets lost in the noise of other words that are hurled at us from all directions. You’ll hear this flurry of words in the incessant blare of television commentators in hospital waiting rooms and airport lounges. It appears in written form in the newspaper and online, in tweets and Facebook rants. This verbosity is one sided. There’s no dialogue. There’s no listening. It’s just a lot of talking with no real conversation.
This talking speaks loudly. And it usually gives us one consistent message, even if it’s phrased in different ways. The distinct message here is that Jesus’s prayer for love and unity is over, has petered out over the centuries, is unrealistic, is utterly impossible. Of course, Jesus’s name is rarely mentioned, but the implication is clear. We’re listening to a faint whisper from the past that is soon to die out if it hasn’t already.
This barrage of words convinces us, even if unintentionally, that sacrificial love can hardly be real for us. We should be afraid instead. There’s little we can do except to embrace our fate and ride out the wave of troubled times. Jesus’s prayer has died out. We are left hanging with the dreadful ring tone of a phone line gone dead.
This cacophony of words to which we are subjected day and night, even against our will, is no conversation at all. It’s a narrative spun out of anger and fear. It’s the reactionary claim of talking heads disconnected from a larger body who have lost the ability to hope that Christ’s love can be made real. It’s the language of a world that is afraid of such love because of what it demands. In response, words are flung against a wall and into our faces without seeming to expect anything back in return. There is no conversation.
Which makes it so very different from what St. John invites us to listen in on. Jesus prays to the Father not just for his immediate disciples but for us, too. We only hear Jesus’s voice, but if we listen carefully, we can also hear the implied response of the Father. And before too long, we are a part of that conversation between Father and Son.
But despite our distorted values, Jesus’ prayer has not been entirely drowned out. It’s still humming in our ears, a faint tone underneath raucous clanging. The tone of Jesus’s prayer is still heard in tactile and compassionate responses to unspeakable violence. Christ’s prayer has threaded its way down the ages in the lives of saints and martyrs whose lives enabled love to be real on the ground. This prayer sounds in the ordinary corners of our communities if we listen closely and don’t hang up the phone.
The conversation we’re meant to hear does not control us by fear or anger or reactivity but draws us in by love, because the only way that we can keep the conversation going is to experience, know, taste, feel, smell, hear, and see what this love is really like. And once we know such love, we are compelled to pass it on in our lives. Selfless love lived might just be a love embraced.
This conversation of love is so dynamic and alive that it spills out beyond its immediate participants. Its purpose is to widen the circle so that the conversation never stops adding more voices to it, and it never ends. This conversation is meant to give life, not to kill it, to open dialogue and not to shut it down.
I don’t know exactly when some people stopped listening to this conversation. I don’t know what happened for some to begin to favor the sound of angry and fearful screeds and to submit to nihilism. I don’t know what has led others to give up godly love and to retreat into wordless words or numbing silence or murderous action.
But I do know that because we are in this church today, we are being called to listen to something else. We are called to hone our ears like the finest musicians to tune into a conversation that has been happening since before the worlds were made. We’re not being asked to eavesdrop. The conversation to which we are asked to listen is intended for us to hear. It’s meant for us to carry on, because there is an aching world that needs to hear it.
Despite what we are told, Jesus’s prayer has not been lost. It’s still alive. No matter how many people have hung up the phone on this great conversation, I urge you: continue listening. Stay in the room. Keep the conversation going. And just maybe, others will listen.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Seventh Sunday of Easter
May 29, 2022