But Jesus is no pedantic academic or philosopher or theologian here. No, he gets very personal – personal about his relationship to the God whom he addresses as Father. Elsewhere in this Farewell Discourse, Jesus is very personal when he talks about the coming of the Holy Spirit, as was the focus of last week’s sermon.
Furthermore, Jesus gets personal not just about God the Father and the Holy Spirit in relation to himself. He gets personal about us, too, as Jesus’ followers.
Much of this personal stuff in this lesson focuses on pronouns. Remember your school lessons about pronouns. There are personal pronouns, demonstrative, interrogative, indefinite and possessive pronouns – and reciprocal, relative, reflexive and intensive pronouns….
By my count, there are some 75 pronouns in this 269-word passage. That is, pronouns of one sort or another comprise about 28% of the words of this gospel reading.
Most of the pronouns are personal and possessive pronouns – he, you, yours, him, they, their, those, them, I, me, we.
As a preacher I love to focus on words in the Bible that often get overlooked. It might be more obvious in this gospel reading to focus on themes like eternal life, or glory, or Jesus’ words, or Christian unity, the oneness that Jesus’ seeks for us.
But the pronouns – easily overlooked – are quite revelatory, especially in their extent and number.
What is a pronoun? (You didn’t think you’d get a basic grammar quiz in a sermon, did you?) A pronoun is a word that can substitute for nouns or noun phrases. Most of the pronouns in today’s passage substitute either for Jesus, the Father, or Jesus’ followers, the disciples.
It becomes unmistakably clear from this passage that Jesus, as God’s Word made flesh and sent by God, is the point of contact, the connector, the mediator between God and Jesus’ followers – his original followers as well as we who continue as Jesus’ present-day disciples.
Pronouns serve here to connect us to God through Jesus, even as the pronouns also connect Jesus to God. Part of the confusing, mind-bending nature of this reading is that it’s hard to keep straight who is who. He, you, yours, we, they, them, their, those… Who exactly are we talking about here?
And that’s part of the point of such connectivity. Jesus and God, again, whom he calls Father, are inseparably connected. And by virtue of our connection to Jesus as his disciples, we are by extension also connected intimately with God.
Or as we might put it in what would become standard teaching of the church: by baptism, we share in the life of the Trinity. Our participation in the Godhead is so intimate, so connected, that it is difficult to tell where one leaves off from the other.
Moreover, our inter-relatedness with God extends to the whole human family, which likewise is all inter-related, because we are all God’s children created in the divine image. Ultimately in God, we humans are true community. It’s a true communion that we share in God’s grand scheme of things. This is a magnificent feature of the mystery of our faith centered in the mystery of the Trinity.
And our inter-relatedness with God and each other conveys a profound message, both prophetic and consoling, to our broken, ever more divided world.
Our message is a challenging, confrontative prophetic word to those who would continue to divide and separate out, us vs. them, pitting one against the other to divide and conquer.
In contrast, our gospel is a consoling, comfortable word to those longing for connection, belonging, community, communion – poignant in these days of social isolation because of the pandemic.
But there’s more to say about pronouns. In addition to connecting nouns or subjects, pronouns also serve to maintain distinctions and honor boundaries between the nouns to which they refer. This is perhaps especially true of possessive pronouns – mine, yours, theirs.
So, while there is unity in the Godhead and oneness between God and us and among us in Jesus, there are also important distinctions. That is to say, we are not subsumed into God or into each other so as to lose our distinctive identities, our uniqueness as individuals and as different communities.
Thus, we anticipate Trinity Sunday in a couple of weeks – while there is one God, there are three distinct persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
And while we are united with God, we are not the same as God. We remain God’s creatures. We do not become creators.
This aspect of our message is also both a prophetic and consoling word in our day.
Our Trinitarian teaching is a prophetic word to the arrogant and proud who think they are solely responsible for their achievements in distinction from others and from God, God who is ultimately the author and source of all our blessings.
Additionally, our message is also a prophetic word to those who want to trample on the individual rights of others, or eradicate whole cultures through forms of genocide, and on the list goes about how we tend to try to stamp out God-given uniqueness in others.
Then our message about our God-given uniqueness is a consoling and liberating word to those whose personal boundaries have been violated in one way or another by others, whose uniqueness has been transgressed or even eradicated.
This is some of what the 75 pronouns in today’s gospel reading help to teach us about God, and about our relationships to God and each other.
You see, the theological intricacies of our Christian understanding of God are not just reserved for professional theologians off in the ivory towers of the church. No, these ideas have profound practical implications for our life together, not just in the church, but in how we might live together in society.
Not that society can attempt to completely organize itself according to Christian Trinitarian principles in theocratic ways. No. But the themes of our inter-relatedness co-existing with the distinctiveness of our unique individuality can inform the kind of world we want to re-construct on the other side of the pandemic.
God lead and guide such efforts in faithful, healing ways.
For Christ is risen. Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia. Amen.