God is a saving God for us;
the LORD, my Lord,
controls the passageways of death (PS 68: 21)

How long is eternity?  The question itself is couched in temporal terms, as if it is a measurement of time.  We, as humans have trouble fathoming what eternity could mean in terms of an infinity of time – time forever more – because we exist in time and space, and these two delimiters frame largely how we encounter life.  At the same time, we intuitively know that we have access to the infinite, we have the capacity to have relationship with one we may call God.  Time intersects eternity in this way.  Indeed, this could be one way of looking at the Incarnation – God became one of us – the Infinite Eternal Godhead took on space and temporality – became one of us!  And then there’s the question of eternal life…

Jesus raised his eyes to heaven and said,
“Father, the hour has come.
Give glory to your son, so that your son may glorify you,
just as you gave him authority over all people,
so that your son may give eternal life to all you gave him.
Now this is eternal life,
that they should know you, the only true God,
and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ.

The Gospel (Jn 17:1-11a) describes Jesus requesting from the Father, of all things, ‘glory.’  This word glory normally elicits notions of grandeur, accolades, praise and adulation.  However, as we follow what Jesus is saying, we find that he is not characterizing glory in that way, and also he is only asking for glory in order to return that same glory to the Father.  In addition to this, the glory that he is requesting being given has ultimately to do with an ongoing giving.  It is going to get passed on in the form of eternal life.  Following this, we then have eternal life almost ‘defined’ by Jesus.

The glory requested is the ongoing gift of eternal life, which is simply, “that they should know you, the only true God, and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ.”  So, there it is – the glory of giving eternal life spelled out in a nutshell – that WE may know God and the one God sent.  There is nothing particularly magnificent sounding about this from the traditional context we normally associate with glory.  It also doesn’t seem to speak of eternity or eternal life as necessarily involving the transcendence or escape from our temporal (time-bound) existence.

To know God is impossible from the rational standpoint alone.  To know God can only occur through love.  We are brought into life, sustained in life and can only ‘know’ God in our life through and in Love.  This is the great gift of glory that Jesus was sent to bring us, and is that which he has indeed given to us.  And remarkably, it seems that this is the glorious gift of eternal life itself.

I do not pray for the world but for the ones you have given me,
because they are yours, and everything of mine is yours
and everything of yours is mine,
and I have been glorified in them.
And now I will no longer be in the world,
but they are in the world, while I am coming to you.

As Jesus goes on, we then hear the encircling language of giving again, specifically in terms of belonging.  “The ones you have given me…they are yours and everything of mine is yours and everything of yours is mine” It is the constant gesture of giving away and receiving that establishes how we belong to each other, not as possessions but as the very nature of life itself.  This living does not involve possession, but rather it is ecstatic, giving and receiving, and all through this – belonging. It’s a description of radical communion life.  Is this eternal life – the radical engagement in life, living in and through each other?  If so, what happens when we die?

In the Acts of Apostles (Acts 20:17-27), Paul, who is heading for Rome soon, is saying some of his own last goodbyes to the communities he helped form, and he also seems to be speaking about this glory of the transmission of this eternal life…

You know how I lived among you
the whole time from the day I first came to the province of Asia.
I served the Lord with all humility
and with the tears and trials that came to me…
and I did not at all shrink from telling you
what was for your benefit…
for I did not shrink from proclaiming to you the entire plan of God.

Proclaiming the entire plan of God sounds like a bold claim made by Paul.  I wonder, though, if he is talking about this same glorious self-giving that has its source in our God, the Divine, and comes to us in the sent one, Christ, ultimately being given to us, only so that we continue to give. Is this not the Love of God itself living more and more as it is shared in communion?  Is this the glory of eternal life itself – the Life of the Spirit living deeply in and through us?

So, what if this is really about our lives, this eternal life?  If so, we are already living it, to the extent that we are consciously engaged in the communion love of Christ coming to us in our everyday lives.  How surprising would that be that we, in our own ordinary lives, are living eternal life?  We may ask what happened to the promise of eternal life beyond our death. We may feel somewhat disappointed looking at it this way. However, it doesn’t have to be disappointing, if we can find ways to engage right now in eternal life.  To eternally LIVE!

Find creative ways of discovering how you belong to others in ways that you may not have imagined before, and also, cultivate that same creativity in discovering how everyone else belongs to you as well.  Again, not a belonging in the sense of possession or ‘having’ but in sharing the Holy Spirit – the sourcing Love action of the Divine within and around us.

Mind you, it will take practice and surrender, mistakes and perseverance, real death experiences and transformative living ones.  Yet, is this not the eternal life-way – LIVING – that Jesus taught his disciples – the same Divine Living/Giving nature of the one he called Father?  When we live our lives through the radical awareness or knowing (loving) God, then we in the Spirit of Christ becomes the sent ones.  Living eternally this way, all of our “deaths” – all of them, even the one we most fear –are just as the Psalm tells us – “passageways of death” into more life in our God who is a saving God!