SCOPE OF JESUS'S HIGH PRIESTLY PRAYER IN JOHN 17, THE

Encounter, Winter 2006 by Janzen, J Gerald

JESUS'S UNIVERSAL PRAYER CONCERN

Martin Buber has written somewhere that we should not speak of the holy and the not-holy but rather of the holy and the notyet-holy. In a similar vein, I recall someone reporting that when Ernst Bloch, the Marxist philosopher, was asked to sum up his philosophy of hope in a sentence, he responded by saying (presumably by way of revising Aristotle's fundamental logical axiom of identity and difference, enshrined in the saying, "A is not B"), "A is not yet B." The centripetal tendency of the concern for holiness, when it is not transvalued, is to remain content with the distinction, "A is not B." That is, to draw a sharp distinction between the holy and the not-holy, and then to draw a boundary around the holy and protect it from the not-holy-in effect, to take the holy "out of the world." The centrifugal impulse discernible in John 17:15-19, and then again in 17:20-23 (where the concern for sanctity becomes reframed in terms of the concern for oneness), operates out of the divine concern that A may yet become B-that all that is as yet not holy may yet become holy. If Jesus prays "directly" only for his disciples and those who believe through the word of those disciples, and if he prays only "indirectly" for the world, this does not mean that the world lies merely on the fringe of the scope of his intercessory concern. The Jesus of 4:31-42 and 6:51, I suggest, prays so intensely for his followers precisely because, once he returns to the Father, it is they who are to bear his name in witness to the world for the sake of the world.23 If they are to be "perfected" (teteleiomenoi, "completed, finished") into one, it is not simply for the sake of their own perfection. (That would be, as Deutero-Isaiah says, "too light a thing" [49:6].) It is for the sake of their participation (14:12) in the "work" by which Jesus "finishes" the work of God (4:34; 5:36; 17:4; 19:28).

The point can be put this way: the Prologue asserts that all things were made through [the Word], and "without him"-choris autou, outside of him, apart from him-was not anything made. Neither, in Jesus's prayer in John 17, is any part of that creation outside of his prayer concern. One mark of those who understand themselves to be his disciples is that the very concern for participation in Jesus' sanctification of himself should commit his followers not to withdraw into a "holy huddle" but to move outward into the world seeking the oneness of the world in God and God's Christ. In the terms of the Nicene Creed, if the first defining mark of the church is its unity and the second its holiness, the third is its apostolicity-its "sentness" into the world. In a subsequent paper I hope to explore the implications of such a vision, and in particular of the scenario in John 4:1^2, for Christian practice at the Lord's Table.

1Unless otherwise indicated, scripture is taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.