The Prayer of Jesus

Easter 7 2024; John 17:6-19

As C. K. Barrett points out, the Synoptic Gospels refer quite a lot to Jesus praying, but a lot less to what he actually prays about. One of the exceptions is the prayer in Gethsemane (Mark 14:35 and parallels) which, like this long prayer in John, comes between the final meal and Jesus’ arrest. Unlike the Synoptic versions though, Jesus’ prayer in John does not focus on “cost, sorrow, or distress” but commends the disciples to God with confidence and love.¹

This is in keeping with how the passion narrative as a whole in John depicts Jesus in his conflict with the powers of the world, not as suffering or wavering, let alone as desperate, but as calmly pursuing the completion of his task, even on the cross. This does not mean that John avoids the human dimension of the passion, or depicts a Jesus lacking in emotion.

We must assume that John and his readers knew perfectly well that what Jesus had undergone, since they still saw people being subjected to torture and execution fairly regularly. John’s Gospel is an interpretation of that experience of Jesus. We misread John if we think the issues are being avoided; they are being retold from an Easter perspective. Despite the apparent event of an abandoned religious leader being obliterated by an inexorable and oppressive political force—the power of Rome—John claims that Jesus actually triumphs.

The emotions of Jesus are on display in this passage, even though the theme of love so prominent in the previous two weeks has now changed into a concrete hope for protection and consecration. There is considerable continuity between this prayer, which takes up the whole of chapter 17, and the long discourse preceding it from which the two previous Sunday Gospels were taken, with the theme of unity in God perhaps most evident.

With barely a pause, Jesus now begins speaking not to the disciples but to the Father. There are other cases in this Gospel (notably the encounter with Nicodemus in chapter 3) where Jesus’ speech seems to let the characters present fade away, as all our attention is given to his words and we rather than they become the addressees. Here the disciples remain present as far as the narrative logic is concerned, but time has stopped in the room where the supper had unfolded, the company of friends now frozen mid-bite or mid-sentence, as Jesus speaks in the eternal time-frame of his relationship with the Father.

The lectionary divides what has often been called this “high priestly prayer” of Jesus,² but which Mary Coloe and others suggest is better termed a “missionary prayer” (on which more below), across the three years of the cycle, for good or ill.³ Year A has the first section which commits Jesus himself to God and asks for his own “glorification” (which sounds very different, when we bear in mind what that actually means); in Year C, the last part is a prayer for those who will come to believe; the middle section which we read in this Year B links the two with a prayer for those disciples present.

Workshop of: Niccolò di Tommaso (Florence, c.1350); Detail of Last Supper scene (from the base of a Tabernacle). Yale University Art Gallery

There are some echoes here, as C. H. Dodd points out, of the Synoptic Lord’s Prayer: the name of God is emphasized (Matt 6:9), and with the address “Holy Father” (17:11) creates a sort of parallel with the opening of the shorter prayer taught to the disciples. The emphasis on protection from the evil one (17:15) likewise echoes Matt 6:13.⁴

The point of the prayer is, as Coloe suggests, “missionary.” The prayer provides a kind of “what now” for his disciples after Jesus’ departure. He is here providing a program for those whom he entrusts to God’s care, and who are in conflict with the “world.” There are three petitions for them: for protection or keeping in the Father’s name (v.11), protection or keeping from evil (v.15), and for sanctification in the truth (v.17). The first two may speak more or less for themselves; the third is less self-explanatory.

This “sanctification” (or perhaps better “consecration”) language is the main source of the “high priestly” label for this prayer. Various persons, as well as objects and places, can be “consecrated.” John’s only other use (10:36) refers to the Father’s choice and commission of Jesus, without much further specification; Jesus is consecrated to do his work, however it will take its course. By praying that they also be consecrated, Jesus makes the disciples into a group with a divine purpose; they might variously be seen as prophets, priests, offerings, or even a temple. To this end, he also sanctifies (or perhaps better “consecrates”) himself (17:19), which links his work and fate with theirs.

Striking throughout is the treatment of “the world.” There is a deep ambiguity in this Gospel about “the world",” which on the one hand was “made though him” (1:10) and which “God so loved” (3:16) but which also “did not know him” (1:10b).

The disciples constitute a community somehow quite distinct from that “world.” We should not assume this demarcation urges or assumes any particular form of sectarian behavior. It is an analysis of how Jesus’ followers live according to a different understanding of authority, because they have a different understanding of truth itself, based in Jesus. The “world” in this sense does not mean the creation, which after all is his and made through him. Nor does it mean change, or unfamiliar or innovative behavior, as some forms of moralism and conservatism try to claim. The “world” here is John’s term for the present order of human and (to some extent) cosmic relations, where hatred and violence claim to wield power, and in an obvious sense still do. Yet in a deeper—if so-far necessarily invisible—sense, love and peace are actually the deeper reality.

Jesus prays for his disciples, but as they have become in him, a kind of divine presence whose love and authenticity will be an effective sign to the world—and which the world is likely to resist, or worse, precisely for that reason. The “consecration” to which he commits himself, and which he prays for them (or us), is not a sort of cultic or ecclesial separation, a “holiness” that implies self-importance, but a life which shows itself—just as his own holiness did—in the quality of love with which we live and pray. When he prays thus and we pray thus, the world becomes a different place; while we admit the depth of its brokenness—and our own—we can also glimpse and live into the beauty and truth for which God intended it.

1. Barrett, The Gospel of John, p. 500

2. On the history of this see Harold W. Attridge, “How Priestly Is the ‘high Priestly Prayer’ of John 17” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 75, no. 1 (January 2013): 1–14.

3. See Mary L. Coloe, “John 17:1-26: The Missionary Prayer of Jesus: Australian Biblical Review.” Australian Biblical Review 66 (2018): 1–12.

4. Dodd, Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, 417.