Today’s Gospel lessons provides tremendous insight (examples).  It is an example of perfect communication.  Communication basically has three components: the sender, the recipient, and the message.  Christ knew each of these components perfectly (explain).  But what is it that is being communicated?  For Christian, no matter what words are spoken (about baseball, the weather, theology), the real message is always love.  Especially obvious in this prayer from Christ to His Father.  This prayer captures love’s essence (unity) and its purpose (joy).  Unity and Joy.  This is our inheritance. 

Do you have joy?  Not superficial, nor an opiate to blind to reality.  Reality is brutal.  Some say the joyous Christian is naïve: but not true.  We have all seen enough [bad stuff] for a dozen lifetimes.  Because he understands how things should be [i.e. how they were meant to be] and because he spends a lifetime growing in discernment, the true Christian sees more than most.  He also spends a lifetime cultivating a genuine sympathy for others.  So the Christian is not joyful because he doesn’t notice or care about suffering; there is something else going on.  You need this joy: without it, discernment and sympathy only bring despondency.

Two anecdotes to help understand this joy:

Anecdote One: Deployments

Long and difficult deployments to war-torn places.  Important work, called to do it.  Duty.  Serving for and with good people.  But hard.  See much (especially if that is your job).  Exhausting.  There is some joy in good work, well done; but a greater part (at least for me) came in the realization that such a life is not normal, that “real life” is elsewhere, and that you eventually get to go home. 

Isn’t that what our lives are like?  We are called to do important things: to serve one another, to build and sustain communities, to help and love one another, to spread peace and understanding.  And there is joy in doing these good things well.  But we are exhausted: there is always more to do.  We have a sense that the kind of madness which surrounds us is not normal, that our home is elsewhere. Christians understand why they have these feelings, and knows that they will eventually get to go “home.”  Is this selfish?  No.  Because (unlike real war, where some people have to live there) Christians know that everyone’s deployment eventually ends, and that everyone goes on to their reward.  They know that all will one day be remade in perfection.

Anecdote Two: The Life of Christ

Christ was on the hardest deployment ever: the difference between His true home and the war zone He volunteered to serve in was HUGE.  He suffered tremendously during His time on earth.  And I do not mean the pain inflicted on his person – there were far greater sources of suffering than this.  Because He was omniscient, He saw everything: all the suffering, all the heartache, all the hard-heartedness.  Because He was love, He also felt everything.  He knew everyone else’s pain as his own (sympathy).  Can you imagine this burden?  But the joy did not leave Him.  It could not leave Him.  Nor could it defeat Him.  It is true that He alleviated much pain during His earthly ministry: he fed people, he taught them to help each other, he cured some people’s diseases and blindness, he even raised some from the dead.  But as with deployments to places wracked by decades of war, on their own, these were just a drop in the bucket. 

The joy of Christ was not that he brought temporary relief to a few people in a particular time and place, but that HE WAS BRINGING AN END TO ALL PAIN AND SUFFERING.  He knew better than any of us how unnatural things were, how all of us were made for something different, something better.  His joy was not that His own deployment would end and that He would soon ascend to the right hand of His Father.  His joy was in knowing that through Him, all sin and suffering were being defeated.  That He was freeing all men from the slavery of sin; that He was ending the tyranny of the Evil One; that He was defeating death itself.

Do YOU know this joy?

This is the joy that God is offering you right now.  He wants you to be one with Him so that you “may have [His] joy fulfilled in [yourselves]”.  He wants you to be part of the love that He is, and that He shares with His Father (and that His Father shares with Him).  He wants us to be one with one another; to share this love and joy.  Yes, as Christ says, we are still living in the world, and there is much to be done: more than we can do in a million lifetimes.  And we should devote ourselves to getting things done.  But we do this with the knowledge that the real work has already been done.  That Christ has defeated death and has Ascended to His Father’s right hand to prepare a place for us there.  That through Him we can attain perfection, and that all the world is being remade into the home we long for.

You have seen much.  You have felt much pain.  You will see more and feel more.  But there is joy.  Jesus Christ is your savior.  Accept Him.  Trust Him.  Embrace Him and one another.  This is the message of today’s Gospel, this is what is being communicated in Christ’s prayer: are you listening?