John 17.14-26

14 “I have given them your word. And the world hates them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. 15 I’m not asking you to take them out of the world, but to keep them safe from the evil one. 16 They do not belong to this world any more than I do. 17 Make them holy by your truth; teach them your word, which is truth. 18 Just as you sent me into the world, I am sending them into the world. 19 And fort their sake I make myself holy so they can be made holy by your truth.

20 I am praying not only for these disciples but also for all who will ever trust me through their message. 21 I pray that they will all be one, just as you and I are one — as you are in me, Father, and I am in you. And may they be in us so that the world will trust you sent me.

22 I have given them the glory you gave me, so they may be one as we are one. 23 I am in them and you are in me. May they experience such perfect unity that the world will know that you sent me and that you love them as much as you love me. 24 Father, I want these whom you have given me to be with me where I am. Then they can see all the glory you gave me because you loved me even before the world began!

25 O Just Father, the world doesn’t know you, but I do; and these disciples know you sent me. 26 I have revealed you to them, and I will continue to do so. Then your love for me will be in them, and I will be in them.”

Comments

Jesus finishes his prayer by praying for the followers he already had and then praying for everyone else who would follow him because of them. Here we have one specific instance where Jesus prays for you and me. There are a few key themes here. One is stated there at the end (and a few times before). Jesus declares he has revealed the Father to his followers. Because of what Jesus has shown them, his followers know that God is loving, just, trustworthy, and interested in a close relationship with us. So close that we can share in the unity Jesus says he has with the Father. The key revelation is that the Father loves us, that God loves the whole world so completely that God is willing to do the unthinkable – die – for that love. You can find statements in the Hebrew Bible that talk about God’s unfailing love, but that is not the general picture of God a lot of people get from those scriptures. Jesus comes to show us what we would otherwise not understand – that God loves us like the Father loves the Son. God’s love is a selfless, unconditional love. And that love is the very nature of God’s presence; God’s existence is defined by love.

1 John 4.8 tells us that “God is love” that unconditional, selfless love is not just part of God’s nature but is the one thing that defines the entirety of God’s nature. Agape, the Greek word for ‘divine love’ was a word in Greek before Jesus was born, but it only meant this vague notion that sometimes love felt stronger than eros (physical love) or philia (friendship love). Sometimes love is so strong it can only be described as spiritual, when you give yourself completely to a moment and become lost in that moment, when self-love fades, where you move beyond objectifying and reciprocating. But then the moment is gone and you’re back to this realm. The notion was there but it was not tied so much to any of the Greek gods (the closest was Aphrodite, but her name means “sea foam” which evokes the ephemeral quality I was just describing), and certainly not to the God of Israel. It is the Incarnation that we celebrate at Christmas, God coming down to earth, laying aside all divine self-perogative and becoming fully human that begins to show us what selfless love looks like. It is the suffering and death on the cross that will complete that picture, that new revelation that God is love.

I said this idea of God as agape was new with Jesus. It was new in that no one had understood it before then, but it had actually always been true. Isa. 63.7-9 says:

7 I will tell of the Lord’s unfailing love.
I will praise the Lord for all he has done.
I will rejoice in his great goodness to Israel,
which he has granted according to his mercy and love.
8 He said, “They are my very own people.
Surely they will not betray me again.”
And he became their Savior.
9 In all their suffering he also suffered,
and the messenger of his presence saved them.
In his love and mercy he redeemed them.
He lifted them up and carried them
through all the years.

The “messenger of his presence” is Isaiah’s way of pointing to Jesus. Agape is suffering with those who suffer. Agape is lifting up and carrying those who cannot stand, who cannot walk. Agape is healing the sick. Agape is giving sight to the blind. Agape is feeding the hungry, giving clothes to the naked, visiting those in prison. Agape is dying for the sins of the world. Agape is presence, the Spirit, that fills all who trust in the One who came, was born of Mary, died on the cross, and rose again. Agape is empowerment to follow the command of Jesus: love your neighbor as yourself. At their best moments, eros and philia include some measure of selflessness. But that is not their nature. They always involve some love of self. Love of neighbor is different. Love of neighbor is agape, because it is loving the one we do not choose, loving the one we do not desire, loving the one who cannot or will not reciprocate love with us. It is the love of God come down and born among us that we celebrate in this Advent season. It is the love of God we are called to extend to our neighbors.

And it is this love that Jesus prays about here. He asks the Father that our community be fundamentally marked by this love. That looks like two things: being radically present to the world around us and living in unity with other followers of Jesus. Both of these communicate the selfless, unconditional agape love of God to the world that God so loves. The trouble is both are kind of hard. It is hard to live in unity with people we have significant disagreements with. We don’t teach the same theology, we don’t organize our communities in compatible ways, and most of all, we don’t seem content to follow Jesus in our own way and allow others to follow Jesus in their way. We feel a persistent need to argue everyone else into agreement with us and vilify those who don’t. When a church or a leader uses “biblical” as an adjective to describe themselves, that is what they are doing. Not-so-subtly stating that anyone who disagrees with them actually disagrees with the Bible, and therefore God. That sort of stuff doesn’t help us live out the love of God.

It’s also hard to love those arounds us. But we have been called to love our neighbors. This is not a matter of preference, choice, likes, taste, or common interests. Just proximity. The only thing a neighbor shares with you is space. And it’s not easy because this is divine love we’re talking about. It goes against the grain of our culture and nature. Loving enemies. Loving unlovable people. The love of God is radical. The grace of God is offensive.

In cities all over the United States, local government officials, many of whom are Christians, are making it illegal to share food with homeless people. This past Saturday, the Wake Forest Christmas Parade passed right in front of our little downtown storefront/old house church. It was cold and rainy, so we set up a canopy and a table giving away coffee, tea, and hot chocolate. People assumed we were trading the drinks for donations. When we told them it was just free, you could see on their faces, “does not compute.” Why? Because agape love is not natural. It is divine. It is how God loves us. It is how God calls us to love those around us so they can begin to understand how God loves them. Jesus prays we will accept his radical, offensive love and give it away to others. I hope his prayer keeps getting answered.

New Living Translation (NLT) Holy Bible. New Living Translation copyright© 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale HousePublishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

John 17.1-13

17 After saying all these things, Jesus looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son so he can give glory back to you. 2 For you have given him authority over everyone. He gives eternal life to each one you have given him. 3 And this is the way to have eternal life—to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, the one you sent to earth. 4 I brought glory to you here on earth by completing the work you gave me to do. 5 Now, Father, bring me into the glory we shared before the world began.

6 I have revealed you to the ones you gave me from this world. They were always yours. You gave them to me, and they have kept your word. 7 Now they know that everything I have is a gift from you, 8 for I have passed on to them the message you gave me. They accepted it and know that I came from you, and they believe you sent me.

9 My prayer is not for the world, but for those you have given me, because they belong to you. 10 All who are mine belong to you, and you have given them to me, so they bring me glory. 11 Now I am departing from the world; they are staying in this world, but I am coming to you. Holy Father, you have given me your name; now protect them by the power of your name so that they will be united just as we are. 12 During my time here, I protected them by the power of the name you gave me. I guarded them so that not one was lost, except the one headed for destruction, as the Scriptures foretold. 13 Now I am coming to you. I told them many things while I was with them in this world so they would be filled with my joy.”

Comments

Chapter 17 is the end of John’s Farewell Discourse. After this, we get into the arrest and the passion story, where John falls much more in line with the other three Gospels than he has at any point so far. That coming agreement serves to throw this passage into additional relief as the place where John is perhaps most at odds with the other three. Mark and Matthew depict a suffering Jesus who says, “My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death,” and prays three times not to have to go through with the crucifixion. (Mk. 14.34 and Matt. 26.38) In Luke, Jesus only prays this one time, and though Jesus doesn’t make the same statement, Luke does tell us, “he was in such agony of spirit that his sweat fell to the ground like great drops of blood.” (Lk. 22.44)

We don’t get any of that here in John. This entire chapter is a prayer from Jesus to the Father, but it is nothing at all like those other prayers. If we wanted to reconcile the accounts we would need to ask whether John’s prayer comes before or after the others. Did Jesus pray confidently and then break down or did he break down and then recover enough to pray confidently? There are examples in the Psalms of each type of movement and I have done it both ways (you probably have too). I don’t feel a need to figure this out but it is interesting to let the confidence of John’s Gethsemane sit on a garden bench next to the desperation of the other Gethsemane accounts.

There are also interesting features within this prayer. For some reason Jesus uses the third person to talk about himself to the Father in prayer in v.1-3 before switching to the first person for the rest of the prayer. One commentary tried to make the point that this is a normal way of praying, but, um, no, it’s not. I don’t think I have ever once used my full name when praying for something relating to myself. In fact, I just tried it and it felt as weird as I thought it would (try it, go on, try it. See what I mean?) The commentator’s point though was that “Son” and “Christ” are actually more titles than names and thus good to pray about. I might quibble about “Son,” but certainly “Christ” means “anointed one,” and is a title. The point is well taken. I don’t often pray about “Michael Raburn,” but I do pray a lot about how the words “husband,” “dad,” “pastor,” and “professor” relate to me. We would do well to follow Jesus’ example in referring to the titles/names that connote responsibilities in our lives. We will never fulfill those on our own as well as we can when we rely on the empowering Jesus has been promising since ch. 14.

Another interesting feature is the mini-creed in v.3: “And this is the way to have eternal life – to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, the one you sent to earth.” Why did Jesus need to pray this? Is this really something intimate between him and the Father? Or is this one of those ‘prayers’ the pastor ‘prays’ in church that is more sermon than prayer, more for the benefit of the human hearers than the divine Hearer? Those seem so disingenuous and I want to believe Jesus was above that sort of thing. Or maybe John is sneaking some doctrine in, making one last push against those who were denying the divinity of Jesus (remember the Ebionites I’ve mentioned several times) by putting words in Jesus’ mouth. But that is such an easy cop out and more patently false than the (wink-wink) pastory ‘prayer’ explanation. Hold this thought.

The last interesting feature for today is that in some ways, this prayer follows the script of the Lord’s Prayer (you know the famous one, “Our Father…”) from Matthew. It’s not a perfect one-to-one (and the details are more than we can get into here), but there are enough parallels that some commentaries build their whole explanation around it. The point is that the confidence Jesus expresses here is in line with the confidence he taught us to pray with. He taught us to address God as “Father” and state our case positively and boldly, just as Jesus does here.

John has given us such a divine-leaning take on Jesus that we’re prone to read this prayer not as a prayer. We’re prone not to hear the desperation so present in the other Gethsemane accounts. But I think it is right there under the surface. I think this is the prayer of a man who has risked everything because he trusts the Father, he trusts what he thinks the Spirit has been saying to him. He hopes that this is the right path, all the miracles lend themselves to that hope, but in the end, he is a man facing an uncertain future. Well, he is certain of his impending violent death. Beyond that there is only hope. No certainty. Only opportunity. Jesus recites the faith statement in v.3 to build up his own faith, to remind himself, with the listening Father as witness, of what he believes, of why he is doing this. He recaps all he has done, not in a self-congratulatory way, but as one hoping that he has in fact revealed and brought glory to the Father, according to his anointing (hence the self-naming) and intention. He prays as a man who knows he is leaving human life – leaving behind people he loves and a work unfinished, a work barely begun.

Jesus prays here because he trusts the Father. Jesus prays because he hopes his works and teachings have done their part. Jesus prays because he loves his friends, both the ones he had met and the ones he hopes will become his friends down the road.

In short, we get a very high, divine view of Jesus here because of what he says. And we get a very low, human view of Jesus because he doesn’t just say, he prays it, trusting it to be true.

New Living Translation (NLT) Holy Bible. New Living Translation copyright© 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale HousePublishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.