Knowing we are loved

Seventh Sunday of Easter, 1 June 2025: Acts 16:16-34; Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20-21; John 17:20-26; Psalm 97

“I made your name known to them“

It’s the last Sunday of Easter, and Jesus is making sure not only that he is known by his disciples, but by those who believe in Jesus through them. What is important to Jesus is that they know that just as Jesus and God are one, so they are one with Jesus and God. It’s a big ask.

Jesus has passed to his disciples the glory given him by God, and they will pass it on to those they meet, who will pass it on—eventually to us. The work of Easter is intense: not only Resurrection, but also knowing what it all means. For the disciples, Jesus resurrection re-framed what they had learned from him over the preceding years. They understood what he had been saying in new ways.

Jesus is very clear about the different dimensions of this knowing. First, and maybe most amazing, is that just as God is in Jesus and Jesus in God, he wants the disciples, and all those they reach, to know that they are in Jesus and God. Then he gives his glory to them, “so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me”. Then he wants the disciples to be with him “to see my glory”.

For Jesus, seeing and knowing are crucial. How do we know what we know about God? The stories the disciples told have been told for centuries; we read them every week in the scriptures. We probably mostly first encountered Jesus through those stories. Yet Jesus tells us that it is love that is crucial. It is finally the love which Jesus has from God that he shares with his followers “so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them”. Love and presence are linked together here. We know Jesus by his love.

The reading from Revelation says more about that love. In John’s vision, Jesus reminds his hearers that he has sent an angel with the testimony. Jesus wants people to know. “let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift”.

May the gift of Easter to us be knowing that we are one with Jesus, and surrounded by his love.