A great text on unity is the prayer that Jesus addresses to his Father in chapter 17 of the Gospel of John. I will limit my commentary to verses 11 to 23
This text has been described as the ‘priestly prayer’: Jesus, the high priest of our faith, praying for his disciples and for all those who will believe in him. Acting where two or three are united in his love, he continues to intercede for us. (Matthew 18:20-21)
It has also been called the ‘Testament of Jesus’: what is most dear to his heart and which is a synthesis of his entire Gospel. ‘Nothing is more valuable than unity: because it is at the heart of the testament of the One we want to love above all else,’ writes Chiara Lubich.[1]
V 11 ‘Holy Father, keep them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one as we are one.’
The essential is said right at the beginning of this verse: to be united among ourselves as Jesus is united with the Father. What does this mean? Can we understand such a great mystery?
We sense that it must be something immense. We can only ask the Father to allow us to enter into this mystery of communion and to show us how to live it. Only Jesus knows its dimensions; only he can reveal to us the path to this unity with the ‘holy Father’ – at once transcendent and very close – and with one another.
V. 13 ‘But now I come to you… so that they may have my joy in its fullness within them’.
Jesus talks about joy. Experiencing unity brings joy. What is Jesus’ joy? That of being always united with the Father. When we are in communion with him and with one another, we receive great joy.
But conversely, when there are divisions between us or a lack of friendship, joy disappears. And when joy is no longer there, there is no point in accumulating actions. It is better to do something very simple in unity – even if it is imperfect – than to accomplish a great thing with divisions, where joy is absent.
V. 15. ‘I am not asking you to remove them from the world, but to protect them from the Evil One’.
What is the world in which we are living the adventure of unity? As we know, this world is ambiguous. It is both the creation of God and the object of his love, but it is also in opposition to God. Jesus asks that we be protected from the Evil One, that is to say from the ‘Diabolos’, the one who wants to divide everything. Where are the fault lines in our lives, in the Church and in society today?
V. 18 ‘You sent me into the world; in the same way I send them into the world’
As I read and reread this great text, three points stood out clearly for me: sending, sanctification and unity. It seems to me, first of all, that the heart of this prayer of Jesus is the sending of his disciples
Jesus knows that he is going to return to his Father. Who will continue the work he has begun after his departure? His disciples who accompanied him during his three years of ministry! And these disciples represent every believer to this day.
Still in the Gospel of John, Jesus confirms this sending in the first words he addresses to his disciples in the Upper Room (or the Cenacle), after his resurrection:
‘Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’’ After these words, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:21-22).
Jesus‘ identity is to be sent: “as the Father has sent me”, as is the identity of his disciples: “I also send you”. Jesus’ identity is missionary. It is ours too. This identity is not reserved for a few, but describes anyone who wishes to follow Jesus.
Let us note these three words again: ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’. The mission will be accomplished in the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus is the Spirit-filled Messiah. He lived his life in the Holy Spirit. He gives us his Spirit so that we can be his witnesses. To be a Christian means to be filled with the Spirit, since ‘Christian’ comes from ‘Christ’, which means ‘Messiah’. This word means precisely to be filled with the Holy Spirit.
Sanctification and unity: the two conditions of being sent
To be a witness of Christ, so that through us the world may know and believe that Jesus is the one sent by the Father and may be saved, there are two indispensable conditions. These are the other two central points of this text that I would now like to address.
These two points are sanctification and unity, without which the mission of the Church cannot be fulfilled. We have to sanctify ourselves by living the Word of God, as Jesus sanctified himself by doing the will of God in all things:
‘Sanctify them by the Truth. Your Word is the Truth’ (v. 17). ‘For them I sanctify myself for them. Then they too will be sanctified by the truth (v.19).
It is through the Word of God that we sanctify ourselves. Just as Jesus lived the Word to the full, loving God and his own to the utmost, our vocation is also to do nothing without the Word of God.
The second condition for being sent to follow Jesus is unity, based on the model of the Trinity: ‘May they all be one as you, Father, are in me and I am in you, so that they also may be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me’ (John 17:21).
This is a relational unity that is not to be opposed to the ‘rational’, theological unity. But it must come before all else, as the apostle Peter says: ‘Above all, love one another ardently’ (I Peter 4:8).
It is this ‘above all’ that matters. We must therefore check the quality of our relationships before doing anything.
V. 20. I pray not only for them, but also for those who through their words believe in me: that they may all be one… »
Two categories of disciples are the recipients of his prayer in this verse: ‘them’, that is to say his disciples whom he has before his eyes: the apostles whose feet he has just washed; and ‘those who…believe in me through their word’. The first group is strictly Jewish. The second includes Jews, but numerically speaking, mainly people from the nations who will come to faith in Jesus through their testimony. It is first to the Jews (Rom 1:16), then to the nations that the first Jewish disciples of Jesus are sent (Matt 28:18-20).
Of course, the unity in John 17 does not only concern the question of believers of Jewish and pagan origin, it applies to all temptations of division that can attack the unity of the body. But also to this unity. This relationship between the two therefore seems possible and legitimate.
According to R. Washington, this verse expresses ‘the mystery of the new Man’ in Ephesians: the reconciliation in Christ of Jews and Gentiles (2:14-16; 3:3-6). A mystery that has been present throughout history right up to the present day. This is why Paul never stopped kneeling down and calling them to unity: ‘Welcome one another, as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God,’ he said to the Jews and pagans of Rome (Rom. 15:7).[2]
‘May they all be one’! The vocation of Israel and the nations is unity in the Messiah. A rich but fragile unity, because it is relational. It is in the image of the relationship that unites Jesus to the Father. We can no longer live side by side without meeting each other, or live in indifference towards one another. But in the history of the Church, this ‘mystery of the new man’ has been disfigured by the persecution of the Jewish people, which led to the exclusion of the ‘Ecclesia ex circumcisione’, the Church born of circumcision.
Through our faith and our baptism, Christ has united us to him; we belong to him and nothing can separate us from him. But he has also united us to one another, we belong to one another and we must not allow anyone to separate us from one another.
V. 21. ‘As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be one in us.’
To be one in the Trinity is to live in the manner of the Trinity. And how do the Father and the Son live? Always turned towards one another in love! This is our highest ideal. ‘Before expressing Jesus’ ardent desire that all ecclesial divisions be overcome, the text reveals what constitutes Christian existence at its deepest level according to John: the UNITY of the Father and the Son, in which believers participate and which they express in their fraternal love,’ writes X-L. Dufour. [4]
It is not a question of one existing alongside the other, nor of one being subordinate to the other, but of a ‘perichoresis’, an incessant movement of interpenetration and love. Jesus says to his Father, ‘I am in you’ and not ‘next to you’ or ‘under you’. And this constitutes the model of unity in the Church, which is a communion of love between persons and communities, not subordination or juxtaposition.
This ideal is not abstract; Jesus revealed to us through his life what it means to be ‘turned towards God’ (Jn 1:2). Until the end, and especially on the cross, he did not cease to love the Father, even when he had the terrible feeling of experiencing his absence and abandonment. There is no unity without looking at Jesus crucified.
In the same gospel Jesus says: ‘I shall draw all men to myself when I am lifted up.’ (John 12:32)
Raised up from the earth in both his death and his resurrection, Jesus saves all those who put their trust in him (3:14f) and thus unites humanity in him. It is not through his words and his miracles that Jesus unites us, but through his cross.[5]
If we are faithful to his cross, by accepting the trials of life with faith and by loving one another, Jesus will continue to draw humanity to him through us.
V. 21b. ‘So that the world may believe that you have sent me’.
This second part of the verse is often forgotten. The consequence of unity must be faith, the conversion of the world. Conversely, it is the divisions between Christians, which have led to religious wars, that have given rise to unbelief and atheism.
But when we are united in love, people can regain access to God. In our efforts to communicate the Gospel, our concern must also be to maintain unity among us and to bear witness to the tenderness of Christ.
Let us also note that for the world to believe, it must see this unity among Christians. Unity must be visible. This visibility is expressed in particular in diakonia, in teaching and in prayer, of which the Lord’s Supper is the summit (cf. Acts 2:42). We cannot set limits to this visibility.
V. 22-23. ‘And I gave them the glory that you gave me […] so that they may be brought to perfect unity and that the world may know that it is you who sent me…’
‘I gave them the glory.’ Thierry and Monique Juvet note that Jesus gives his glory to transform us. Consequently, ‘the question of unity has to do with Heaven. Its source is in Heaven. Unity is the fruit of a heavenly transformation of our persons. And this transformation required victory over the world or, more precisely in this case, over the logic of this world with which we are inundated in our relationships’.[6]
‘That they may be brought to perfect unity’. Does this perfect unity exist on earth? Perhaps a foretaste of it was experienced in the house of Nazareth during the thirty years of Jesus’ “hidden life” with his family? Jesus was always present there, and that says it all! In any case, we are all called to advance along this path. It is a question of perfecting ourselves along this path.
If the perfect unity of his disciples is, in the Gospel of John, the last prayer that Jesus addresses to his Father, this means that it is his Testament, what he considers to be the most important. Therefore, if we want to be faithful to him, we have to prefer unity to everything else. This unity is not uniform, but rich in diversity.
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[1] Città Nuova, 15 December 1959. For an initial orientation on the Gospel of John, see Jean-Pierre Lemonon, Pour lire l’évangile selon Saint Jean. Cerf, Paris, 2020. For more detailed information, see the two volumes by Jean Zumstein, L’évangile selon Saint Jean. Labor et Fides, Geneva, 2007 and 2014
[2] Cf Raleigh B. Washington, The One New Man in John 17, in Robert Wolff, ed. Awakening the One New Man, Destiny Image, Shippenburg, 2011, pp. 33-44.
[4] Xavier-Léon Dufour, Lecture de l’Évangile selon Jean. Tome III, Seuil, Paris, 1993, p. 308
[5] On the link between unity and the cross in John, Jean Zumstein writes: ‘The commentary following Caiaphas’ involuntary prophecy in 11:52 had already indicated that the notion of the universal unity of believers is linked to the cross; more precisely, it is a gift resulting from the death of Christ. This means that the author does not consider the question of unity in the context of institutional negotiation aimed at formulating a consensus of doctrine or practice. The unity referred to in the text is a gift. The Gospel According to Saint John (13-21). Labor et Fides, Geneva, 2007, p. 185
[6] Unity is a fruit. https://tmjuvet.leaderschretiens.com/2021/06/03/lunite-est-un-fruit/
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