John 17. The high-priestly prayer pleads for unity for his future disciples

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8


John 17:21 May they all be one, just as, Father, you are in me and I am in you, so that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe it was you who sent me.

JESUS OF NAZARETH Part II
Pope Benedict XVI
JESUS' HIGH-PRIESTLY PRAYER pp.93-102

"That they may all be one ..”

Another major theme of the high-priestly prayer is the future unity of Jesus' disciples. Uniquely in the Gospels, Jesus' gaze now moves beyond the current community of disciples and is directed toward all those who "believe in me through their word" (Jn. 17:20). The vast horizon of the community of believers in times to come opens up across the generations: the Church of the future is included in Jesus' prayer. He pleads for unity for his future disciples.

The Lord repeats this plea four times. Twice the purpose of this unity is indicated as being that the world may believe, that it may "recognize" that Jesus has been sent by the Father: "Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one" (Jn. 17:11). "That they may all be one; even as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me" Jn. (17:21). "That they may be one even as we are one ... that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you have sent me" On 17:22-23).

No discourse on ecumenism ever lacks a reference to this "testament" of Jesus—to the fact that before he went to the Cross, he pleaded with the Father for the unity of his future disciples, for the Church of all times.
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should be. Yet we have to ask with all the more urgency: For what unity was Jesus praying? What is his prayer for the community of believers throughout history?

It is instructive to hear Rudolf Bultmann once again on this question. He says first of all—as we read in the Gospel—that this unity is grounded in the unity of Father and Son, and then he continues: "That means it is not founded on natural or purely historical data, nor can it be manufactured by organization, institutions or dogma; these can at best only bear witness to the real unity, as on the other hand they can also give a false impression of unity. And even if the proclamation of the word in the world requires institutions and dogmas, these cannot guarantee the unity of true proclamation. On the other hand the actual disunion of the Church, which is, in passing, precisely the result of its institutions and dogmas, does not necessarily frustrate the unity of the proclamation. The word can resound authentically, wherever the tradition is maintained. Because the authenticity of the proclamation can­not be controlled by institutions or dogmas, and because the faith that answers the word is invisible, it is also true that the authentic unity of the community is invisible ... it is invisible because it is not a worldly phenomenon at all" (The Gospel of John, pp. 513-14).   

These sentences are astonishing. Much of what they say might be called into question, the concept of "institutions" and "dogmas" to begin with, but even more so the concept of "proclamation", which is said to create unity by itself. Is it true that the Revealer in his unity with the Father is present in the proclamation?
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Is he not often astonishingly absent? Now Bultmann gives us a certain criterion for establishing where the word resounds "authentically": "wherever the tradition is maintained". Which tradition? one might ask. Where does it come from; what is its content? Since not every proclamation is "authentic", how are we to recognize it? The "authentic proclamation" is said to create unity by itself. The "actual disunion" of the Church cannot hinder the unity that comes from the Lord, so Bultmann claims.

Does this mean that ecumenism is rendered superflu­ous, since unity is created in proclamation and is not hindered through the schisms of history? Perhaps it is also significant that Bultmann uses the word "Church" when he speaks of disunion, whereas he uses the word "community" when considering unity. The unity of proclamation is not verifiable, he tells us. Therefore the unity of the community is invisible, just as faith is invisible. Unity is invisible, because "it is not a worldly phenomenon at all."

Is this the correct exegesis of Jesus' prayer? It is certainly true that the unity of the disciples—of the future Church—for which Jesus prays "is not a worldly phenom­enon". This the Lord says quite distinctly. Unity does not come from the world: on the basis of the world's own efforts, it is impossible. The world's own efforts lead to disunion, as we can all see. Inasmuch as the world is oper­ative in the Church, in Christianity, it leads to schisms. Unity can only come from the Father through the Son. It has to do with the "glory" that the Son gives: with his presence, granted through the Holy Spirit, which is
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the fruit of the Cross, the fruit of Jesus' transformation through death and Resurrection.

Yet the power of God reaches into the midst of the world in which the disciples live. It must be of such a kind that the world can "recognize" it and thereby come to faith. While it does not come from the world, it can and must be thoroughly effective in and for the world, and it must be discernible by the world. The stated objective of Jesus' prayer for unity is precisely that through the unity of the disciples, the truth of his mission is made visible for men. Unity must be visible; it must be recognizable as something that does not exist elsewhere in the world; as something that is inexplicable on the basis of mankind's own efforts and that therefore makes visible the workings of a higher power. Through the humanly inexplicable unity of Jesus' disciples down the centuries, Jesus himself is vindicated. It can be seen that he is truly the "Son". Hence God can be recognized as the creator of a unity that overcomes the world's inherent tendency toward fragmentation.

For this the Lord prayed: for a unity that can come into existence only from God and through Christ and yet is so concrete in its appearance that in it we are able to see God's power at work. That is why the struggle for the visible unity of the disciples of Jesus Christ remains an urgent task for Christians of all times and places. The invisible unity of the "community" is not sufficient.

Is there more that we can discern about the nature and content of the unity for which Jesus prayed? One essential
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element of this unity has already emerged from our con­siderations thus far: it depends on faith in God and in the one whom he sent: Jesus Christ. The unity of the future Church therefore rests on the faith that Peter proclaimed in the name of the Twelve in the synagogue at Capernaum, after other disciples had turned away: "We have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God" (Jn 6:69)·

This confession is very close in content to the high-priestly prayer. Here Jesus encounters us as the one whom the Father has sanctified, who sanctifies himself for the disciples, who sanctifies the disciples in the truth. Faith is something more than a word, an idea: it involves entering into communion with Jesus Christ and through him with the Father. Faith is the real foundation of the disciples' communion, the basis for the Church's unity.

In its nucleus, this faith is "invisible". But because the disciples unite themselves to the one Christ, faith becomes "flesh" and knits the individual believers together into a real "body". The Incarnation of the Logos is perpetuated until the measure of Christ's "full stature" is attained (cf. Eph 4:13)·

Faith in Jesus Christ as the one sent by the Father includes mission as its second structural element. We have seen that holiness, that is to say, belonging to the living God, signifies mission.

Throughout John's Gospel, then, and especially in chapter 17, Jesus, the Holy One of God, is the one sent by God. His whole identity is "being sent". What this
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means becomes clear from a passage in chapter 7, where the Lord says: "My teaching is not mine" (7:I6). He lives totally "from the Father", and there is nothing else, noth­ing purely of his own, that he brings to the Father. In the farewell discourses, this characteristic identity of the Son is extended to include the Holy Spirit: "He will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak" (16:13). The Father sends the Spirit in Jesus' name (14:26); Jesus sends him from the Father (15:26).

After the Resurrection, Jesus draws the disciples into this dynamic of mission: "As the Father has sent me, even so I send you" (20:21). A defining characteristic of the community of disciples in every age must be their "being sent" by Jesus. This will always mean that for them, too, "my teaching is not mine"; the disciples do not proclaim themselves, but they say what they have heard. They rep­resent Christ, just as Christ represents the Father. They follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit, knowing that in this total fidelity a process of maturing is simultaneously at work: "The Spirit of truth ... will guide you into all the truth" (16:13).

In this quality of "being sent", characteristic of Christ's disciples, and inasmuch as they were bound to his word and to the power of his Spirit, the early Church was able to recognize the form of "apostolic succession". The continuation of the mission is "sacramental", that is to say, it is not self-generating, nor is it something man-made, but it is a matter of being incorporated into the "Word that existed from the beginning" (cf. I Jn 1:1), into the com­munion of witnesses called forth by the Spirit. The Greek
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word for succession—diadoche—refers to both structure and content. It points to the continuation of the mission in the witnesses; but it also points to the content of their testimony, to the word that is handed down, to which the witness is bound by the "sacrament".

Together with "apostolic succession", the early Church discovered (she did not invent) two further elements fundamental for her unity: the canon of Scripture and the so-called regula fidei, or "rule of faith". This was a short summary-not definitively tied down in every detail to specific linguistic formulations—of the essential content of the faith, which in the early Church's different baptismal confessions took on a liturgical form. This rule of faith, or creed, constitutes the real "hermeneutic" of Scripture, the key derived from Scripture itself by which the sacred text can be interpreted according to its spirit.

The unity of these three constitutive elements of the Church-the sacrament of succession, Scripture, the rule of faith (creed)—is the true guarantee that "the word can resound authentically", that "the tradition is maintained" (cf. Bultmann). Of course John's Gospel does not speak in so many words of these three pillars of the community of disciples, of the Church, but with its refer­ences to Trinitarian faith and to "being sent", it lays the foundations for them.

Let us return to Jesus' prayer that, through the unity of the disciples, the world may recognize him as the one sent by the Father. This recognizing and believing is not something merely intellectual; it is about being touched
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by God's love and therefore changed; it is about the gift of true life.

The universality of Jesus' mission is made visible; it concerns not just a limited circle of chosen ones-its scope is the whole of creation, the world in its entirety. Through the disciples and their mission, the world as a whole is to be torn free from its alienation, it is to rediscover unity with God.

This universal horizon of Jesus' mission can also be seen in two other important texts from the Fourth Gospel: first, in Jesus' nocturnal conversation with Nicodemus: "God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son" (3: 16), and then-with the emphasis here on the sacrifice of his life-in the bread of life discourse at Capernaum: "The bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh" (6:51).

But how do we reconcile this universalism with the harsh words found in verse 9 of the high-priestly prayer: "I am praying for them; I am not praying for the world"? In order to grasp the inner unity of the apparently contradictory prayers, we must remember that John uses the word "cosmos"-world-in two different senses. On the one hand, it refers to the whole of God's good creation, especially to men: his creatures, whom he loves to the point of the gift of himself in the Son. On the other hand, the word refers to the human world as it has evolved in history. Corruption, lies, and violence have, as it were, become "natural" to it. Blaise Pascal speaks of a second nature that in the course of history has supplanted the first. Modern philosophers have described this historical
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state of mankind in various ways, as for example when Martin Heidegger speaks of being reduced to the impersonal, of existing in "inauthenticity". These same issues are presented in a very different way when Karl Marx expounds man's alienation.

Philosophy in these instances is ultimately describing what is known to faith as "original sin". The present "world" has to disappear; it must be changed into God's world. That is precisely what Jesus' mission is, into which the disciples are taken up: leading "the world" away from the condition of man's alienation from God and from himself, so that it can become God's world once more and so that man can become fully himself again by becoming one with God. Yet this transformation comes at the price of the Cross; it comes at the price of readiness for martyrdom on the part of Christ's witnesses.

If we take one last look back over the whole of the prayer for unity, we can say that the founding of the Church takes place during this passage, even though the word Church does not appear. For what else is the Church, if not the community of disciples who receive their unity through faith in Jesus Christ as the one sent by the Father and are drawn into Jesus' mission to lead the world toward the recognition of God-and in this way to redeem it?

The Church is born from Jesus' prayer. But this prayer is more than words; it is the act by which he "sanctifies" himself, that is to say, he "sacrifices" himself for the life of the world. We can also put it the other way around: in this prayer, the cruel event of the Cross becomes "word ",
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it becomes the Feast of Atonement between God and the world. From here the Church emerges as the community of those who believe in Christ on the strength of the Apostles' word (cf. 17:20).
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