Readings
Acts 16: 16-34
Our Acts reading follows on from last week’s reading where the reader met Lydia, the dealer in purple cloth, who worshiped God and whose whole household became believers.
This week’s reading has two incidents of liberation—one a slave girl through exorcism which creates hostility from her owner and then there is the liberation of Paul and his companion that results in the jailer and all his household being baptised.
John 17: 20-26
This reading is part of Jesus’ farewell speech from John’s Gospel. In this section the theme of love fades, and incarnational theology takes over.
I suspect that, like so much of John’s gospel, this has much more to do with the theology of the Christian community where the Gospel was written than what Jesus might have believed or said. That does not minimise its importance to us but rather increases its importance because it is about how the Jesus event affects the lives and understanding of Christians like us.
This part of the speech is clearly Trinitarian, or rather biniterian. (Two persons of God rather than the full three) It connects Jesus and the Father or creator with no mention of the Spirit, but it also connects us, the followers of Jesus, to the creator as well and Jesus is the active agent in that connection.
The interpretation of the theological language is that this passage is saying that God is not out beyond the galaxies but here within the human condition. We understand that and relate to God, not through temple sacrifices and a priestly class who speak the divine language or have the divine email address.
God can be accessed from the cloud simply by entering the correct password.