John 17:1-11 (Year A Seventh Sunday of Easter, also Year B, Seventh Sunday of Easter, verses 6-11) is part of the intercessory prayer of Jesus. My purpose is to interpret this prayer within Johannine theology, to situate the prayer within the farewell discourse, and to argue for a high Christology, especially the pre-existence and ontological unity of the Son with the Father.
Summary
John 17:1-11, part of Jesus' intercessory prayer, profoundly outlines the unity between Father and Son, and the pathway to eternal life for believers. The prayer begins with Jesus' glorification of the Father through his completed work, allowing the Son to be glorified in turn. This glorification isn't just a future event, but a restoration to the Son's pre-existent fellowship with the Father, an explicit claim of their oneness.
Eternal life, a central theme, is presented not as a distant reward, but as the present experience of knowing the Father, revealed uniquely through the Son. This knowledge contrasts sharply with the Mosaic revelation, emphasizing a new, direct relationship with God. Jesus' ministry has focused on revealing God's name and words to his disciples, distinguishing them from "the world" while preparing them for their mission within it.
The prayer then intercedes for these disciples, whom the Father has given to Jesus. Anticipating his imminent departure, Jesus prays for their protection from the world's contaminating influence and, crucially, for their unity, mirroring the perfect oneness of the Father and Son. This deep spiritual connection is established through Christ's love and sacrifice, drawing all people into union with God.
I strongly emphasize that glorification is not sequential or merely eschatological but reciprocal and eternal, grounded in pre‑creation fellowship between Father and Son. I explicitly identify this as an argument against anti‑Trinitarian interpretations.
I define eternal life not as future reward but as present participation in divine knowledge, mediated through Christ. I contrast this interpretation with Mosaic/Torah-centered revelation.
I portray unity among disciples as a participation in divine oneness, not simply organizational harmony. I frame division as a manifestation of “the world,” from which disciples require protection.
What I especially emphasize is that prayer is participatory action, knowledge is rlational and salvific, and unity is ontological before it is ethical.
Context
Chapter 17 is the resounding conclusion of the discourse, for the fight is fought and the victory won upon the field of the spirit and by the power of God. It is stamped throughout by the terminology and style of John.[1] It is intercession for disciples now and in the future.[2] The prayer gathers up much of what has been said and presupposes the total picture of Christ and his work with which the reader should be acquainted. Every verse contains echoes, which I will explore. The central theme of the farewell discourse has been to explore what it means to be united with Christ, treated in a variety of aspects. Christ is imparting life in union with Christ to them as he speaks. The interchange of intimate conversation among friends is itself the process of uniting people with Christ. They are proleptically being invested with the benefits that are theirs through the supreme act of love through the sacrifice of Christ. They are incorporated with Christ in the love which is mutual indwelling, and in which knowledge and vision of God brings eternal life to people. This relation between Christ and his friends is grounded in the archetypal relation in which Christ stands to the Father. The prayer is the ascent of the Son to the Father. It is that spiritual ascent to God which is the inward reality of all true prayer. In thus praying, Christ both accomplishes the self-oblation of which his death is the historical expression and draws all people after him into the sphere of eternal life, which is union with God, beginning with his disciples and then expanding to all who are to believe in him to the end of time. An interesting overlap occurs in the theme of the Hermetic writings (100-300 AD) of the Poimandres and De Regeneratione. The prayer of Christ can be understood as part of the farewell discourse, but both are analogous to Hellenistic documents. Proclaiming his eternal unity with the Father, he explains to the candidates for imitation how they may become one with Christ and so enter that eternal unity. In union with Christ, they are not of his world, they belong to the sphere of being born from above, to which Christ belongs. He is ascending to the Father and will take them with him that where he is they may be also. Having thus prepared them, he offers the prayer in which he brings them with him into the presence of the Father, thereby accomplishing their union with the Father. The difference in John, however, is that this teaching occurs in a communal context, that knowledge or union with God that imparts eternal life is understood in the ethical term of love, and their knowledge of God is mediated by an historical transaction, the departure and return of Christ, that only on the cross can Christ draw all people to him, the prayer that they mall be one finding fulfillment in the laying down of his life.[3]
Verse-by-verse study
Verses 1-5 are the exordium, reciting the commission of Christ and reports his full discharge of it to the mutual glory of Father and Son. The prayer begins with a theme of glorification (verses 1-8). After lifting up his eyes (11:14), Christ addresses the prayer to the Father (πάτερ) The hour of revelation contained in the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension has come, whereas in 7:30 the hour has not yet come, and thus Jesus being the Son still depends upon the resurrection.[4] This progression of events is a movement toward the glorification of the Son (ὁ υἱὸς) and the unity of the Father with the Son. In Jesus, the disciples have seen the glory of the only Son of the Father (1:14). His prayer is that the Father would glorify the Son so that the Son may glorify the Father, whereas in 7:39 Christ had not yet been glorified. Jesus shows himself to be the Son precisely in his self-distinction from the God.[5] The Son acts to complete his own sending, with everything in the conduct of the Son serving to glorify the Father and enhance the irruption of the reign of God into the world,[6] even as in 3:35 the Father has entrusted everything to the hands of the Son, giving authority to the Son (Dan 7:13, referring to the Son of Man). The eternal life the Son gives to his followers, those whom the Father has given him (6:37, 39, 10:28), where in 10:28 Christ gives eternal life to his sheep, speaks to the quality of relationship that the believer has with the Father. As in 14:7-9, where to know Christ is to know the Father, the content of that eternal life, which is not pie in the sky by and by, is to know in this moment the Father, whom the Son reveals, is the only true God (5:44 the only God), and, the only time in the gospels Jesus uses this title, Jesus Christ (Ἰησοῦν Χριστόν) whom the Father has sent. The prologue asserted that the Son, who is close to the heart of the Father, made the Father known (1:18). Finely summarizing the synoptic tradition, and referring to 3:34, where he said his food is to do the will of the one who sent him and to complete his work,[7] the Son has glorified the Father through the work the Father gave him to do, as Jesus hallowed the name of God by honoring and proclaiming the lordship of the Father (13:32). Affirming 1:14, where the glory that he has from the Father as only Son of the Father, such glorification now between Father and Son is glorification the Son had in the presence of the Father before creation (1:1-2), thereby affirming the pre-existence of the Son and in contradiction to the Socinian and other anti-Trinitarian teachers.[8] The glorification by the Father (πάτερ) of the Son restores the Son to his original fellowship with the Father. The glorifying of the Father by the Son finds correspondence in the glorifying of the Son by the Father. [9] All this is an explicit claim of the oneness of the Son with the Father and the conviction of the pre-existence of the Son.[10]
In verses 6-8 is a brief review of the ministry of Jesus and its results in revealing the name of God to his disciples and transmitting to them the words (τὸν λόγον) of God, a designation for the Christian message,[11] while they have received the divine message, thereby attaining faith and knowledge. In 3:11, Christ tells Nicodemus that we speak only about what we know and witness only to what we have seen. The Son has revealed the divine name (person, nature, essence). The Son reveals the love of the Father, so the believing in Jesus as the Son is an acceptance of the love of the Father revealed through him. The separation from Judaism is alarmingly obvious here. In the Hebrew Scriptures God revealed the divine name (YHWH) to the chosen people through the servant of the Lord, Moses.[12] The Torah is the focus of revelation for the Jew. For John, this revelation through the Son separates those who believe from the world. The Father has given the precious gift of the disciples to Jesus. During his ministry, the has given the words (ῥήματα) of the Father to his disciples, and the disciples have received them. They know that the Son has come from the Father and they have believed the Father sent him, thereby using the language of the prophet like Moses and expressing the Father-Son relation in terms of the Son coming from God.[13] The prologue also affirms Jesus as the true light (1:9) and that grace and truth are through him (1:14, 17). Those who believe receive power to become children of God (1:12). Eventually, the disciples understand the full meaning and impact of Jesus, his divine source, his sacrificial life, and his life-giving teaching.
In verses 9-19 is the middle portion of the prayer, contemplating the disciples in their situation in the world after the departure of Christ. The prayer continues with an intercession for the disciples and for the world (verses 9-11). The assumption in the opening words is the hostility of the world, the opposition of the world to Jesus. “He’s got the whole world in his hand” is a comforting thought, and true from one perspective, but not the perspective of this prayer. The prologue reminds us, however, that the world came into being through the Word (John 1:10). Further, God loved the world so much that the Father gave the Son in order that those who believe would have eternal life (John 3:16). This part of the prayer petitions the Father (πάτερ) on their behalf, in contrast to the world, even the risen Lord will send the disciples into the world. The disciples are those whom the Father has given him. They still belong to the Father, for anything that belongs to the Son belongs to the Father, as in 16:15, everything the Father has belongs to the Son. The Father has glorified the Son in them. By virtue of creation, all are children of God, but John is focusing on the unique way in which one belongs to the Father by believing in the Son. Anticipating that he will no longer be in the world through his passion and crucifixion, his departure is already under way. However, the disciples are in the world. The Son is coming to his Holy Father, a unique term, praying that Father will protect or shelter them in the name of the Father. They need protection from contamination of the world, which will have the result that they will be one, even as the Father and Son are one. Among the great threats the world presents is its divisiveness.
Application
In Act 5 scene 5 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the character Macbeth has heard that the queen is dead and he knows his own death is imminent. At this time, he delivers his famous soliloquy:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow
creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, Out, brief candle
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
and then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot. Full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
Many people have pondered whether Macbeth might be right. Is life nothing but a shadow having no substance, no meaning? Writers and philosophers since recorded time have tried to answer the question. Obviously, no one has been successful in answering the question to the satisfaction of everyone. Someone once said that trying to speak about the ultimate reality is like sending a kiss through a messenger. I understand their point: Something of its truth is lost in the translation. The question of the meaning of human life is a philosophical one to be sure. I think it is also a genuinely human question. At some point, most of us ask it. We may ask it out of a sense of despair, hope, cynicism, curiosity, or a deep desire to have goals and guidance in one’s life. The question may be the most basic and fundamental of questions.
The question of the meaning of life also reveals a quite real problem we have. If the answer were staring us in the face, would we receive it? What would we do if we did not like the answer? I am not so sure we would embrace the answer, especially since embracing it might require us to change the course of our lives. In this part of the prayer of Jesus, John is making it clear that the Jesus as the Son reveals the Father and glorifies the Father. The meaning of a human life is to embrace this truth, to believe it, and live our lives in accord with its reality. We will not easily embrace such a truth. After all, we would rather go on searching instead of committing. We would rather do and believe what we want instead of finding the meaning of our lives outside us and within the life of the Father, Son, and Spirit. Thus, I think John is inviting us to reflect upon some basic issues of a human life.
Followers of Jesus need protection or shelter from the world. The world is a threat to the unity the followers of Jesus have with each other and with God. I came across what I thought was an interesting exploration into the prevalence of dust in our world that might give us a way of thinking about the concern of this prayer.
Dust is our beginning. It is also, most certainly, our end. "You are dust," said God to Adam, before tossing him out of the Garden of Eden, "and to dust you shall return" (Genesis 3:19). Dust is a blessing and a curse. Now, scientists tell us, dust is also a dramatic part of daily living. With every breath we take, we suck in tens of thousands of particles. Although we cannot see it, each of us walks the earth in a cloud of dust, shedding fragments of skin and bits of lint torn from our clothes through friction. One can measure it in microns, which is the type of measurement you can count on the head of a pin. Some of it is harmless, but some of it is deadly. Dust has swept away whole civilizations, burying dinosaurs so fast that they never got off their nests and suffocating all those folks you see in Pompeii, caught forever with a cry on their lips. Science journalist for the Discovery Channel Hannah Holmes suggests that by age 6, our children have consumed at least a cup and a half of pollen, pesticides, lead, dander, and fibers.
In her book The Secret Life of Dust (2001), Holmes promises an exploration of the various lives of dust, or more exactly, particulates. Those who watch the popular television series Bones will remember that “the king of the lab” often refers to particulates.
Some dusts menace the planet and its living residents. Some are beneficial to people, plants, and animals. Many are merely fascinating. All are going under the microscope. And the secret lives of dust are being revealed.
She tracks the enormous dust streams that pour across from Saharan Africa, fertilizing South American rain forests, and that carry the Gobi, particle by particle, across the Pacific Northwest. She also reports that our every human action produces tons of the stuff, from tire dust to the invisible clouds that arise from cooking, vacuuming, gardening and powdering baby. A whole dust food chain lives off it, fungi to mites to cockroaches, and their decomposing bodies and droppings add to the mess.
Dust is everywhere and unstoppable. Every breath you take brings 150,000 to 1 million specks—depending on the grubbiness of your environment—into circulation in your lungs. Many will wash out on the tide of exhalation, but not a lot of those industrial dusts, or asbestos dust, or quartz dust—all of which stay to kill you. Then again, Holmes is quick to admit, do not discount those dust bunnies skulking under the sofa that “contain everything from space diamonds to Saharan dust to the bones of dinosaurs and bits of modern tire rubber.” Then again still, dust fires the hydraulic cycle and gives birth to the stars and the heavenly bodies; every patch of the Earth is made of melted dust. Did dust start the Ice Age? Did it end it? Does dust help suppress asthma? Does space dust form noctilucent clouds?
Dust might be vital to life on our planet (and may, in fact, even be responsible for it). Yet, she also refers to it as this "heartless little brute" that could also be responsible for the deaths of millions. She is not talking about dinosaurs. (Or at least not just yet.). We are swimming in it. It covers us. We might very well have come from it, and--surely, eventually--we will become it.
Fascinating facts from the book:"...you breathe about 700,000 of your own skin flakes each day" "...a cup of flour... isn't legally filthy until it contains about 150 insect fragments and a couple of rodent hairs" "...the average child eats 15 or 20 milligrams of dust a day, and superslurpers eat 30 to 50 milligrams."
Dust. It is downright disgusting. We live in a dusty, musty, and rusty world. The dust is here. It will not go away.
Allow me for a moment to take this natural reality and apply it to spiritual life. Some dust is harmless. We do not need to have any concern about that. Some dust will help us with some forms of disease. We need to pay attention to that and learn what we can. Some dust is deadly. We need to learn to protect ourselves from it.
The prayer of Jesus in John 17:1-11 includes the prayer the holy Father would protect his disciples from contamination by the world. We part of a culture, rather than isolated from it. We must take the risk of what involvement means. As creatures of the earth, we will not live in a dust free environment. The point is that the intimacy of the relationship between the Father and the Son moves us toward such an intimate relationship with Father and Son that we can discern what is contaminating in the world from what is not.
I guess that means we need to maintain that type of intimacy with God.
We are citizens of another world. Jesus wants to provide his followers with a new way of viewing themselves. Jesus creates a new identity for his followers. They are getting a new passport. You are living on this earth, but every nation has become a foreign land. You are citizens of the eternal even as you remain in this temporal world. How do we survive as "foreigners"? If we are foreigners in a strange land, how are we going to cope? How can we make this work?
First, we can embrace our foreignness. If you have done any traveling at all, you know that the local people can always spot a foreigner. They look different, smell different, talk different, dress different and think different. Can we be similarly identified as belonging to God's world, rather than this world? This means, to keep working with the metaphor, that if Jesus says we're foreigners in this world, that the world should recognize us as total foreigners. We think differently. Our values are different. Our approach to life is radically different and sometimes contrary to this world.
Second, we can survive as foreigners by seeking God's protection. Jesus mentions this several times in our text. He asks the "Holy Father" to "protect them" (v. 11). He says that he himself has "protected" and "guarded" the disciples. Again, in verse 15, he says in this prayer to the Father, "I ask you to protect them." Evidently, living in this foreign land is not safe. From what do you suppose Jesus felt the disciples needed protection? It is possible he feared for their physical safety. He certainly was aware of his own fate at this point; and elsewhere he alludes to Peter's manner of death (see John 21:19). Perhaps he feared the attraction of the world itself with all its temptations. The apostle John writes to young Christians saying, "Do not love the world or anything in the world" (I John 2:15, NIV). He goes on to identify things we might love: "the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches" and says that these things do not come "from the Father but from the world" (I John 2:16).
Third, we can survive by hanging out with a community of other foreigners, i.e. people from our own country. Go to any major cosmopolitan, international city in the world, and you will discover that there is a strong German, Turkish, Italian, American, Lithuanian, Bulgarian or Swedish community there. These are just examples. The point is that, if you're a Norwegian living in Singapore, you are going to look for other Norwegians in Singapore. It will help you to survive in this hot and humid city that's perched smack on the equator. Being with other Norwegians will make life a little more bearable. Similarly, if we're serious about acting as foreigners in this world, we, too, will seek the protection of a community of other Jesus people, or God-followers. "So that they may be one." If you want to become a citizen of a country other than the one in which you grew up, you must learn its language, culture, tradition, and rules (written and unwritten, the do and do not). If we are to be citizens of eternity within this temporal world, being part of a community will help us learn the language and the way of life that gives precedence to the word of God (verse 6).
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]
[12] (See, e.g., Deuteronomy 5:11, 10:8, 12:5, 12:21, 14:23, 16:6, etc.; see also John 17:26).
[13]
This is a good base to begin to build our world view. I liked your three points. The key for Christians is to know we are not of this world and to have a world view that is different than those around us. Too many times, in fact most of the time, we forget this and live as though we share the world's world view.
ReplyDeleteThank you. I found it helpful to see that every culture will require some discernment to live in it as a follower of Jesus. Such a decision to follow will always carry with it a tension with the prevailing culture, but not complete opposition. Every culture has redeeming qualities, in other words.
Delete