We have spent the last several weeks listening to Jesus speak at the Last Supper. John gives us something different from Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Rather than repeating everything the other Gospel writers have already told the Church about that night, John, now an old man looking back on those final hours, remembers the words of his friend and Lord. Jesus has washed their feet. Judas has gone into the night. Jesus has spoken about love, obedience, persecution and the Advocate who will come after Him. Now, in John 17, Jesus stops speaking to the Apostles, raises His eyes to heaven and begins speaking to the Father.
We call John 17 a prayer, and of course it is, but it is unlike any prayer we could ever pray. When we pray, a creature speaks to his Creator. Here the Son speaks to the Father. We are listening to a conversation within the mystery of God Himself. Jesus says, “Now glorify me, Father, with you, with the glory that I had with you before the world began.” Before Abraham, before Moses, before Adam, before the Garden, before there was an earth upon which a garden could be planted, the Son was with the Father. The man sitting beside John at the Last Supper is claiming that He was there before creation itself. John began his Gospel with this claim: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Now, as Jesus prepares to return to the Father, we hear the same truth from Jesus Himself.
Perhaps to understand what is happening we have to go all the way back to the Garden. Adam and Eve stood at the beginning of the human race, and their decision did not affect only themselves. Adam chose disobedience, and all of his children were born into the world that followed that choice. None of us ate from Adam’s tree, yet all of us inherited the consequences of the Fall. God did not abandon humanity. He called Abraham, formed Israel, gave Moses the Law and sent the prophets. Through generation after generation He kept a light burning until, in the fullness of time, Christ came. But Christ does not reverse Adam’s decision by eliminating ours. Adam’s choice affected those who came after him without their choosing it; Christ accomplishes our redemption and opens the road home, but He does not force us to walk it. He extends His hand, and we must respond to His grace. John told us this at the beginning of his Gospel: “But to those who did accept him he gave power to become children of God.”
This helps us understand something in Jesus’ prayer that can otherwise sound troubling. Jesus says, “I pray for them; I do not pray for the world but for the ones you have given me.” Christ came for the salvation of the world, but salvation is not imposed upon the world. In this moment He is praying particularly for those who have received Him. Then His prayer reaches beyond the Apostles sitting around that table and across the centuries to us: “I pray not only for them, but also for those who will believe in me through their word.” Think about that for a moment. On the night before He died, Jesus prayed for people who had not yet been born, who would one day hear the testimony of those Apostles and believe. Brothers, He was praying for us.
At the heart of this prayer is a word we hear constantly but perhaps do not think about enough: glory. We say, “Glory to God in the highest.” We pray, “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.” But what actually is glory? We have cheapened the word somewhat by applying it to ordinary accomplishments, yet those ordinary examples may help us understand the divine reality. A father raises his children, sacrifices for them, teaches them, corrects them and loves them, and years later they become remarkable men and women. People look at those children and say to the father, “You must be proud.” Their goodness reflects something about where they came from. The same thing happens when someone we have trained accomplishes something extraordinary. People look at the student and recognize something of the teacher. In this sense, glory is the goodness of the source becoming visible in what proceeds from it.
Now look at Jesus. He repeatedly tells us that He was sent by the Father, that He speaks what the Father has given Him to speak and that He does the works of the Father. People watch Him heal the sick, forgive sinners, touch the untouchable, teach with astonishing wisdom, wash the feet of His disciples and finally surrender Himself completely upon the Cross. When we look at Jesus, we discover what the Father is like. Jesus therefore says, “I glorified you on earth by accomplishing the work that you gave me to do.” His life reveals the magnificence of the One who sent Him. Even the Cross, which appears to the world to be humiliation and defeat, becomes glory because it reveals something almost incomprehensible about God: this is how far God will go to love us. The Son’s obedience glorifies the Father, and the Father glorifies the Son.
Then Jesus says something remarkable: “I have been glorified in them.” He has been speaking about His glory and the Father’s glory, and suddenly He brings His disciples into it. They are to become part of the way His glory is revealed. This changes the standard by which we should judge our own Christian lives. It is certainly good if someone encounters us and leaves saying, “He is a good man. He is generous. He is patient. He helped me when I needed him.” But there is something greater. What if someone encounters us and begins to wonder, “Why does this man love like this? Why did he forgive me when I did not deserve forgiveness? Why did he help me when I could give him nothing in return? Why does he have peace when everything around him is falling apart?” Eventually he discovers that the answer is Jesus Christ. Then he no longer simply says, “What a good man.” He begins to say, “His God must be wonderful for him to love like that.” The first response glorifies the man. The second glorifies Christ, and through Christ, the Father.
Paul gives us almost a perfect explanation when he writes to the Philippians, “Christ will be magnified in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me life is Christ.” Think about that expression: Christ magnified in my body. My forgiveness can magnify His mercy; my generosity can reveal His generosity; my sacrifice can reveal His sacrifice; my patience can reveal His patience. The purpose is not that people should admire my virtues, but that something about my life should make Christ easier for another person to see. This is what Jesus did perfectly. He made the Father visible, and now He says that His disciples are to make Him visible.
But how could ordinary, weak and sinful people possibly accomplish that? Jesus has already given the answer during this same Last Supper. He promised the Advocate, the Holy Spirit: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth.” Then He says something even more extraordinary: “He remains with you, and will be in you.” Jesus is not leaving His disciples with a set of instructions and telling them simply to try harder. God Himself will dwell within them. The Holy Spirit is not merely an inspiration or force sent by God. He is God, and through His Spirit God makes His dwelling within us.
This is not the first time Jesus has spoken about this extraordinary union between Himself and those who believe in Him. We enter this new life through Baptism, but Jesus also tells us that this life must be nourished by Him. Earlier in John’s Gospel He said, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.” Now, at the Last Supper, He promises the Spirit who “will be in you,” and near the end of His prayer He says to the Father, “that the love with which you loved me may be in them and I in them.” There is a beautiful consistency running through John’s Gospel. Christ does not merely show us the road home and then leave us to travel it by our own strength. He gives us Himself. He gives us His Spirit. He gives us grace. God’s own life begins transforming ours from within.
This is why the glory we are supposed to reveal cannot originate in us. If we allow the Holy Spirit to transform us, the divine life within begins to become visible without. The Spirit produces love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity and faithfulness within the Christian soul, and those things eventually become visible in the way we treat other people. We are not simply trying to imitate a great man who lived two thousand years ago. Christ has joined us to Himself. His Spirit dwells within us, He nourishes our life in Him, and He asks us to cooperate with that grace. Christianity therefore moves from the inside outward: God works within the soul, and His presence becomes visible in the way that person loves, forgives, sacrifices and serves.This brings us to what I think is one of the most remarkable parts of the structure of John 17. In verse 14 Jesus says of His disciples, “They do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world.” Then comes verse 15: “I do not ask that you take them out of the world but that you keep them from the evil one.” Immediately afterward, in verse 16, Jesus repeats, “They do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world.” John places essentially the same statement on both sides of Jesus’ request. We do not belong to the world, yet Jesus specifically asks the Father not to remove us from it. A few verses later He tells us why: “As you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world.”
We have not simply been left behind while Jesus returned to the Father. We have been left here deliberately. The Father sent the Son into the world so that the world could see the Father through Him; the Son now sends His disciples into the world so that the world can encounter Him through them. Notice also how similar Jesus’ prayer is to the prayer He taught us. We pray, “deliver us from evil,” and here Jesus asks the Father to “keep them from the evil one.” He does not pray that we will never encounter suffering, temptation or evil. He asks that we be protected from being overcome by them while carrying out the work for which we have been sent.
This brings us back to Isaiah: “Seek the LORD while he may be found, call him while he is near. Let the scoundrel forsake his way, and the wicked his thoughts; let him turn to the LORD for mercy; to our God, who is generous in forgiving.” The road home has been opened, but we have to walk it. Christ reaches toward us with one hand and toward the Father with the other. He is the bridge between fallen humanity and the Father, and He invites us to take His hand. Yet once we do, He turns us back toward the world. There are others who need to experience His love, His mercy and His forgiveness, and He intends for some of them to encounter those things through us. He sends us to love, serve, forgive, feed, comfort and carry others, but He does not send us alone. His Spirit is within us.
Perhaps this is why Christianity can never be reduced simply to avoiding sin. Certainly we must reject sin, but Jesus asks much more than respectable behavior. He wants our lives to reveal Him. That requires us to ask a difficult question: whose glory am I seeking? When I help someone, do I need him to know what I did? When I give, do I need recognition? When I sacrifice, do I secretly keep score? When someone compliments my goodness, am I content for the story to end with me? John the Baptist understood the proper direction when he said, “He must increase; I must decrease.” Our lives should become increasingly transparent, so that instead of another person’s attention stopping at us, it passes through us toward Christ.
Jesus did not ask the Father to take us out of the world. He asked the Father to protect us while we remained in it. He gave us His Spirit and sent us into the world so that His life could become visible through ours. So perhaps this week we should ask ourselves something more demanding than whether we are good men. We should ask whether Jesus Christ is being glorified by the way we live. When someone receives our forgiveness, does he glimpse Christ’s mercy? When someone receives our generosity, does he glimpse Christ’s generosity? When someone sees us suffer, does he see the hope Christ gives? When our wives, children, friends, employees and strangers encounter us, does our love stop with us, or does it make them wonder about the One from whom that love came?Perhaps one of the greatest things that could ever be said about any of us is not simply, “He was a good man.” It would be for someone whose life crossed ours to say, “There was something about the way that man loved me that made me want to know his God.” Then Christ has been glorified in us, and through the Son, we have given glory to the Father.
