Oneness.

John 17

March 13, 2016

I.

After giving his disciples their final instructions and encouragement, the Lord Jesus offers a prayer to God.  It is often called his “High Priestly Prayer,” because it comes just before he offers himself as the atoning sacrifice to take away the sins of the world on the cross; and because it has three sections similar to the organization of the prayer the High Priest says on the Day of Atonement, as we have been reading in Leviticus 16.

He begins by saying that “the hour has come.”  It reminds me of what he says in Mark at the outset of his ministry: “the time is fulfilled.”  Here he means that the moment around which his life has been circling has now become clear; but there is also a sense in which his time was always here, and is always here.  In his ministry he reveals the living Presence of God with and within us all the time.  Now, in his death and resurrection, he will go from being a historical, mortal, separate individual person, and be realized in his essential nature as ever-present and everywhere.

This is the meaning of his looking up to heaven when he prays, raising his eyes to the sky.  It is not that he intends to go up and away, becoming absent and distant.  It is not as if he goes off to some other place.  But just as the sky, the atmosphere, the earth’s enveloping sphere of breath, extends all around us, so also he ascends back into union with all things that God has breathed into being.  He is about to return to his original nature as Light, and Light expands to fill everywhere.

Light is what the word “glory” is about.  It is as if he says to God, “Reveal the transcendent Light of your Son so that the Son may reveal your transcendent Light to all.”  Participation in this Light is to live forever because everything is made of and permeated by this Light.  God’s life, we learned back in chapter 1, is the light of all people.”

We receive and participate in eternal life through Jesus Christ because he is the One in whom the Light of God is focused and revealed.  He is sort of the condensation or the precipitation of this Light, taking the form of a human being.  He is the Word become “flesh.”  That is, he is the Light and breath and Word of God taking shape and form in matter and in a living body… and in this revealing what we all are.

Thus he is given ultimate and universal authority from the author of everything.  Jesus’ authority is not like the counterfeit authority that human leaders wield.  His authority comes from the One who made all things.  It is not a ministration of death, but of life… eternal life because it is the authority of the Creator who is always present, in whom the hour is always now.

Jesus shines into the world the Light of the Creator from the beginning by the work he did in healing and liberating people.  It is not just cognitive, theoretical, or verbal; it is expressed in particular kinds of actions, actions that bring healing, justice, and liberation into people’s lives. 

 

II.

The Lord then focuses in his prayer on the community he calls into being, the gathering of his disciples, his original circle, his church.  These are the people to whom Jesus makes God’s name, that is, God’s true nature and identity, known.  They keep God’s Word of love which Jesus has given them, and they realize that Jesus reflects and expresses God’s Presence, that he comes from God, and they trust in him.  By sharing in the love of God among themselves, they are united to  Jesus and to his Father.

Jesus’ community will be an extension of him, and therefore even an extension of God.  They will be in him “participants in the divine nature” and a continuation of and witness to God’s living Presence in the world.   “All mine are yours,” he prays, “and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them.”  By that he means that the actions of his disciples in loving obedience to him actually serve to reveal him to the world.  They point to him.  People in the world see the presence of God in the love that Jesus’ disciples have for each other.

As Jesus is about to die, he prays that they have the protection of the Father.  This protection is not about their physical safety, as we might imagine.  It is a protection for their faith, that they not lose their trust in him, and that they stay together as one.  God does not protect us from suffering and violence; God does not keep us from deprivation and discomfort.  But God does preserve and strengthen our faith and our unity so that we do not fall away from our true nature, which would be infinitely worse than merely getting inconvenienced or even killed. 

He is leaving them in “the world,” in a situation still under the domination of human principalities and powers.  These powers hate him and will hate them because they are living witnesses to Christ’s Light and life, which reveals the emptiness and evil of these powers.  The disciples do not belong to the world, just as Jesus does not belong to the world.  But he is not taking them out of the world.  Rather, just as God sent the Son into the world, so the Son sends the disciples, the church, the new community gathered in his name, into the world.  The sending of the Son and of the church into the world was not for condemnation, but that the world might be saved from condemnation.

The one member who was about condemnation, Judas, bought condemnation for himself.  But Jesus loses none of the others.  They remain in Jesus’ love and joy, together.

The Lord finally asks God to make them holy, which means participating in the truth of God’s Word, Jesus, and his love.  Holiness here is being set apart… because they know they are not set apart.  It is this knowledge of the truth that sets them apart; but ironically the truth they know is the true nature of creation and humanity.  The truth they know is that we are all one, all of us.  And what sets the disciples apart is that only they know about this unity. 

III.  

Jesus then extends the prayer outward one more layer to include… us.  He prays for those who will come to trust in him because of the testimony of the disciples.  He prays for the second- and third-hand disciples, the disciples who will not have known him as a historical, mortal, individual.  He prays that they also share in this unity, and that there be no second-class disciples.

I think we have lost sight of how important unity is to Jesus.  In Galatians 3:28 we hear Paul talking about how there is in Christ no longer Jew or Greek slave or free, male and female.  Christ breaks down walls and shatters distinctions between people.  We are all equal and loved by God.  This is not to say that we lose our individuality in becoming identical clones, or something.  Paul talks elsewhere about how differently and wonderfully gifted we all are.  But the point is the elimination of pecking orders, classes, and castes.  Gone is any claim of superiority or subordination; gone is any determination of higher or lower value; gone is the establishment of people who are in and people who are out.

In Jesus Christ, God declares that all are in.  That is the message of grace, forgiveness, inclusion, and love we receive from Jesus and live out together in his beloved community, the church.

It is this witness of oneness, this living together without anyone being over anyone else, that proclaims Christ to the world and enables people still caught in the violence and alienation, the competition and enmity of the world to realize that God and this beautiful vision may be trusted.  It may be trusted because in the church it is enacted.  It is actual.  It is happening.

This oneness is the manifestation of God’s Light and life, which we have received; in it we are obedient to God’s Word; it is the proof that Christ sends us just as God send him.  It is the proof of God’s love and therefore God’s Presence in creation.  In short, we — the church, the disciples — are the proof.

He declares that our oneness in the church is a participation in Jesus’ oneness with the Father.  Christ is in us, God is in Christ.  All this is so the world may know the love of God.  

IV.

This oneness, this reconciliation, this atonement — “at-one-ment" — is what Jesus is about to accomplish in a few hours.  He is about to fulfill in himself the taking away of the world’s sin, which is to say its languishing in the illusion of separation from God and from each other.  When that sin, that alienation, that enmity, that opposition, is taken away he allows the truth of our union with and in God to emerge in our consciousness.  He reveals on the cross the overflowing love of God.  This is the love that overcomes and conquers the world.

The gathering of disciples which is sent into the world full of joy in the truth of God’s love, Light, and life… this is us.  This is our testimony.  That the- world-as-we-know-it is crippled in blindness, ignorance, paralysis, and fear.  But the real world, the creation breathed into being by the Creator’s Word, emerges in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.  By his death he blows a hole in the facade of falsehood and lies, and cracks the shell of our hardheartedness.  And through that crack the Light pours into our hearts, reviving our souls, and revealing our unity with each other, and, in him, in God.

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