Reconciling Radically Inclusive Friendship in the Upper Room

Today’s reflection is from James F. Keenan, S.J., who is the Canisius Chair, Director of the Jesuit Institute, and Vice Provost of Global Engagement at Boston College. He has edited or written over 25 books and published over 400 essays, articles and reviews worldwide. In 2003 he founded Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church, a live network of over 1000 Catholic ethicists. In 2022, Paulist Press published his A History of Catholic Theological Ethics and in 2023 Georgetown University Press published his recent Oxford Martin D’Arcy lectures, The Moral Life.

The liturgical readings for Pentecost Sunday are available here.

From Stonewall onwards, the radically inclusive model of friendship lived and practiced in the LGBTQ+ community grew as the primary form of relationship  within our community. Especially during the HIV/AIDS crisis, friendship emerged as the non-negotiable about who one was among other community members. Rejected by family and others, the LGBTQ+ community was born and built on a no-nonsense acceptance of everyone. Each newcomer was accepted as he, she, or they presented themselves. This dynamic was and remains the radically inclusive friendship practiced and lived in the LGBTQ+ community as we recognize, welcome, and welcome back one another. (I recently examined this model of friendship in an essay for Outreach.)

As we celebrate Pentecost, I’d like to reflect with you about how such radically inclusive friendship emerged from the Upper Room where the disciples gathered after the passion and death of Jesus, through the Resurrection appearances and the Ascension, until finally on Pentecost they emerged together from that hallowed space.

We first need to appreciate how central the space of the Upper Room is for the disciples. In Mark’s Gospel, we find them there after Jesus’ death, “mourning and weeping” (Mk 16:10), hearing Mary Magdalen’s report (Mk 16.11), and then the disciples of Emmaus as well (Mk 16:12-13). Later, we do not know how much later, Jesus himself visits them in the Upper Room (Mk. 16:14-20).

Luke’s Gospel is similar except he suggests that the disciples of Emmaus were in the Upper Room both before and after they met the risen Jesus (Lk 24:23).

In John, the distinctive detail is that Jesus visits the disciples a second time, a week later, to reveal himself to Thomas (Jn 20:19-31).

In the Acts of the Apostles, we hear that after the Ascension, the disciples return immediately to the Upper Room (Acts 1:13) and that they are found “together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers” (Acts 1:14). Acts makes a point that they are there for days (Acts 1:15) and that the Pentecost occurs there as well (Acts 2:1-2).

In The Moral Life, I write that the grieving of the Eleven, along with Jesus’ mother Mary and Mary Magdalen, was not an obstacle to their capacity to recognize Jesus but was in fact the very passageway to recognizing him. Through grieving together, they became more vulnerable to their love for Jesus so that they could recognize his risen presence. Grief, vulnerability, and recognition are inextricably linked to the Pentecost story and, in particular, to the role the Spirit plays in our lives and in the church.

Beyond grieving and sharing, I want to accentuate how reconciliation and the birth of radically inclusive friendship in the Upper Room go hand in hand.

Radically inclusive friendship is not easy, especially when members leave, abandon, deny, betray, and leave for dead their so-called friends. We have learned these lessons in our own lives, but at Pentecost, it is good to recognize others who paid the cost of reconciliation to create radically inclusive friendship. A meditation on the Upper Room before Pentecost teaches us in the LGBTQ+ community that the message we preach is not always so easy to practice.

Imagine some of the scenes that happened in the Upper Room in the gospel stories before Pentecost. First, Jesus washed their feet there, telling them to do the same for one another, and then he celebrated the Last Supper in that room. But when they went to pray at Gethsemane, once the arrest of Jesus happens, the disciples flee. Of the twelve, only John appears, in all the accounts, at the crucifixion with the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalen as well as the other women.

Their decision to return to the Upper Room is a remarkably reconciling one. Yet how dare they! These so-called friends of the Lord, abandoned him as well as Jesus’ mother and Mary Magdalen. How dare they return to that room where such friendship was summoned.

Yet where else would they go?

How did they enter the room?  What was it like when one by one they returned? What was it like when Peter showed up, whose denial had to have been known. What did John say?

What shame did they feel as they entered and in light of that shame, how did they grieve?

What was it like when Mary, the mother of Jesus, arrived for the first time? What did she feel when she first saw those who abandoned her son?

What was their shame like when she entered the room? How did they greet her? What words did she speak? What gestures were made? How long did it take for them to become reconciled after such tragedy and betrayal?

What about Mary Magdalen? In each of the accounts, not only is she present at Calvary, she goes on Sunday morning to the tomb. She is not only the first to witness to the Risen Jesus, but she is instructed to tell this news to his cowardly disciples!!! How did she take that command? They were useless at his death and at his burial. What did she feel when she saw them for the first time since Golgotha?

We are told that on the Pentecost they left the Upper Room and that when Peter addresses the crowd, he “stood up with the eleven.” Presumably this is their first public witness to Jesus since the Last Supper. How is it that they stood so prophetically together as one?

From Pentecost onwards, the disciples along with Mary, the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalen, and others are all friends in the Lord, but what about all the shame, grief, and disappointment in the Upper Room during those previous 50 days?

While we believe in radically inclusive friendship, it might be helpful for us in the LGBTQ+ community to realize how much reconciliation we ourselves went through with others to be so included and so inclusive. We each had our encounters in that Upper Room.

When we see and hear Peter preach today standing with his “friends,” we might spend some time praying about how they became reconciled in the Upper Room and how we have been reconciled with one another as well.

From the Upper Room we know that radically inclusive friendships require a great deal of forgiveness. If we are to continue to proclaim these kind of relationships, we are going to have to be both forgiving and forgiven as we move ahead, though now in the Spirit who certainly is with us as we forge forward together as friends in the Lord.

—James Keenan, SJ, May 19, 2024