The High Priestly Prayer: Glory, Presence, Unity
Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year C; John 17: 20-26
This Gospel reading is part of what has often been referred to as Jesus’ “high priestly prayer,” which takes up the whole of John 17. The Last Supper remains the backdrop; having instructed the disciples about his departure and its implications earlier in these farewell discourses (beginning in chapter 13), Jesus is now addressing the Father directly, but with the disciples apparently present and listening. They are an audience, but they are also a subject of this prayer. While the conversation takes place before the events of the Passion, again it concerns the life of the community after Easter.
The label “high priestly” is modern (from the 16th century) but has become very widespread. It reflects two elements of the prayer, at least. One is that Jesus uses the language of consecration (vv. 17-19), as though dedicating himself to divine service. If this is not quite explicit sacrificial language, it could hint at something like self-offering, and so a cultic setting. The “glorification” of which Jesus speaks numerous times, including here, is centered on what he also calls his “lifting up.” The Cross, which is the center of Jesus’ glorification for John, is in some sense a sacrifice, and an act of self-offering that is the work of Jesus as “priest.”
Clearer though is a second point of possible “high priestly” identification, the intercessory purpose of this prayer. While the most basic meaning of priesthood is sacrificial, priestly function can also be understood as mediation between God and the world, or God and some particular people. The prayer of John 17 is certainly priestly in this sense. Jesus not only dedicates or consecrates himself, but asks for the Father’s presence and protection of his friends, for Jesus’ own sake.
More particularly, André Feuillet points out that there is a three-fold structure to the prayer that seems to parallel the actions of the High Priest on the Day of Atonement. In Leviticus 16, the process of expiation moves from the priest to his household, then to the nation (“atonement for himself and for his house and for all the assembly of Israel” 16:17). And here in John 17 Jesus also prays first for himself (“glorify me”), then for these others with him (“I ask for them”), and then in this section being read he prays for others who are not present in the supper scene, but who are the new community being constituted by all these actions including, by implication, the reader.
This priestly parallel is subtle, but Harold Attridge suggests it is an instance of the “construction by misdirection” that often characterizes this Gospel (12). Again and again in John we find Jesus speaking in ways that point beyond the understandings brought by the characters in the narrative, or brought to the text by the reader. So while the allusions to priestly activity may be real, the prayer of Jesus does not leave ideas of priesthood untouched.
The emphasis on Jesus’ own sanctification, or his intercessory action as a priest, initially implies his being set apart from the others present and listening or reading. Priesthood, as we have noted, implies this sanctification and separation of the one who mediates, and of course even more fundamentally it implies the impossible transcendence of the God with whom the priest must communicate on behalf of others.
Yet at the heart of Jesus’ prayer, and of the farewell discourse in general, is a changed set of relationships between him and his followers, and with the Father. Jesus’ long reflection has been focusing prior to this point on his own relationship with the Father, and the work of the Spirit, but also his own abiding and intimate presence with the disciples. This means changing expectations about these distinctions and prerogatives that priesthood otherwise assumes.
Jesus suggests that the sacred barriers between divine life and human existence are not what they appear, given his coming glorification. While apparently absent in future, Jesus (and the Father) will in fact be newly present in the community, and the disciples’ relationship with God will not need brokerage; it is organic, their very existence. They are in effect priests themselves, whose own intercession and mediation is enacted “so the world may know that you have sent me” (v.21).
This part of the prayer, for those others not among those listening but who will become part of the community, concerns unity. These verses have often been used—at least in the last century or so—to lament and challenge the visible disunity of Christians. The mottos of various ecumenical bodies and a 1995 encyclical of John Paul II share the title “ut omnes unum sint,” or similar, the Latin of John 17:21 (cf v.11).
The implied pastoral setting for John’s early readers and the message about unity for them will have been somewhat different from the modern problem of denominational fragmentation, with its implication of various religious commodities to choose as best suits us. These ancient others “who will believe in me through their word” were presumably part of a network of local communities, but not of any centralized institution. Yet disunity was clearly an issue. If the First Letter of John reflects a similar situation as the Gospel assumes, there have already been departures or splits; “the elder” who authors the Letter writes, of some former members: “They went out from us, but they did not belong to us; for if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. But by going out they made it plain that none of them belongs to us” (1 John 2:19).
This is not quite indifference to disunity, but neither is it a call to institutional reunification. The unity of the believers is a mark of their authenticity; if some depart, they never belonged. In what then does the unity that Jesus prays for in the Gospel consist? It is not just “that they may all be one” as the truncated motto suggests, but “…one, as we are one.” It is a profound misunderstanding then to read this as simply being “closeness,” as though the call to unity were an appeal just to stick together. Communities can be close and coherent without that fact telling us anything about their real purpose or identity; they can even be back-slapping coteries of fostering the worst in each other, and forces of evil rather than good.
The unity of the Father and the Son, which is the model of unity spoken of here, is not mere closeness, though it is obviously a kind of unique intimacy. The unity of the Son and the Father, and the unity of the disciples with one another in Jesus, is what is seen in Jesus’ glorification and self-dedication. It is the unity evident on the Cross and at the foot-washing (see the comments on Easter 5). We may not even think that is what unity is, but this is Jesus the High Priest’s version of it; it is to be in solidarity with him, and to show the same willingness for utter self-giving that constitutes his priesthood, and now our own.
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Further reading:
Attridge, Harold W. “How Priestly Is the ‘High Priestly Prayer’ of John 17?” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 75, 2013: 1–14.
Feuillet, André. The Priesthood of Christ and His Ministers. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975.
A little gluey for my taste, yet unity is being reworked at every turn in every age, becoming more and more all-inclusive with differences the same and different and still ONE.