The prayer Jesus offers for His disciples sums up everything said during the Last Supper. It is usually called the prayer for unity, and one can undoubtedly agree with this. Yet it concerns not only outward unity. Jesus again asks the Father to preserve between Him and His disciples the same union that He has with the Father (vv. 21-23). Apparently no testimony is possible without such unity; without it the world will not believe that the apostles truly were sent into the world by the Savior Himself.

Yet bearing witness to the Kingdom and revealing the Kingdom to the world are precisely the chief task of those who are sent. Addressing the Father, Jesus in a sense hands over to the apostles the mission the Father entrusted to Him, while entrusting the apostles themselves to the Father. He says: I have given the life of the Kingdom that You gave Me to everyone who wished to receive it; I have accomplished everything You entrusted to Me (vv. 1-5). I revealed Myself, You, and Your Kingdom to those whom You sent Me, and they accepted everything (vv. 6-8). And now, Jesus says, I am leaving while they remain, and I pray for them, for those who belong to You (vv. 9-11).

Such a request was entirely natural, for the apostles were now becoming witnesses to the Kingdom about which Jesus had previously spoken to the world, and the apostolic community was to become the nucleus of the Church. Previously Jesus Himself had kept His disciples safe in a world hostile to them. Now, as He goes to the Father, He asks the Father to help the apostles preserve the joy of the Kingdom that they knew during the Savior's earthly ministry (vv. 12-13). This does not mean removing the apostles from the world to some other, special reality. The Kingdom had to be revealed here, not somewhere on another planet or in another dimension (vv. 14-16). But to reveal it, the apostolic community had to be sanctified by receiving the fullness of God's living revelation, which the Savior Himself embodied (v. 17). Only then could the apostles become witnesses to the Kingdom and their community the nucleus of the Church, whose very purpose would be to preserve the Kingdom in our still not fully transformed world and bear witness to it. This nucleus would grow, and the Church would expand, including everyone who sought the Kingdom and eternal life (vv. 18-21).

Today we read a passage from the prayer of the Lord Jesus Christ, which He offered during His final conversation with the disciples. It was largely on the words of this prayer that the fathers of the First Ecumenical Council based their faith and ours in the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son. The Lord speaks of His glory, which He had before the world existed, that is, from eternity. Therefore, the fathers of the Council argued, the Arians are wrong to think that the Son is lower than the Father, that He is a creature. Addressing the Father with the words "all Mine are Yours, and Yours are Mine," the Lord speaks of the fullness of His authority, and this too serves as an argument for our faith in the equality and equal honor of the Father and the Son.

It would seem that after seventeen centuries the dispute that then shook the Church has become the property of history. But in the true doctrine formulated at the Council, in the victory of Nicene theology, we see the fulfillment of Christ's promise that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church. In addition, in our time various near-Christian sects include people with Arian tendencies, so the acts of the fathers of the First Council have by no means lost their relevance.

In the Gospel passage itself, the most important words for us are perhaps Christ's words about what eternal life is. Because of historical circumstances, we have become accustomed to an idea of eternal life that comes from Hellenic mythology. In European culture we imagine paradise as a place where the souls of the dead enjoy bliss among flowers and innocent pleasures. And little cupids fly about... This sanatorium of the Olympian gods is a pleasant picture for a vacation, but to be stuck there forever would be endlessly boring.

This picture is completely foreign to the Bible, including the New Testament. The Lord Jesus Christ formulates the essence of eternal life this way: "And this is eternal life, that they know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent." To know God: this is the chief condition of life. To know Christ: this is what transfigures any existence, even the most miserable, building paradise out of it. That is why half-starved hermits freezing in the forests of Northern Rus' or languishing from heat in the deserts of Egypt are already in paradise, living eternal life. That is why eternal life is available to everyone who knows God and does His will. It is fundamentally important that the eternal life of which Christ speaks is open to us right now, not sometime later, after death.

Preparing to leave this world, Jesus prays for those who remain. This is understandable: Christianity is inseparable from the person of Christ Himself. Christianity is not a new religion, not a new theology, not a new morality; it is new life. It is precisely this life that Jesus speaks about, and it is precisely this life that He opened to those who became His disciples. Christianity is, after all, the state of being a disciple of Christ: Christians (that is, messianists) was once the name given only to some of His disciples in one specific city, and only later did all His followers adopt this name for themselves.

Yet Christianity is a very special discipleship. Usually a teacher trains disciples in a craft, techniques, practices - something that, when the training is complete, can become an inseparable possession of the disciple. This applies to any learning: from mastering a craft under an experienced craftsman to training in spiritual and ascetic practices under masters of such practices. With Christ everything is different. Jesus, praying, says that He has revealed the Father's name to His disciples.

The main thing, however, lies elsewhere: in the life to which He has joined them. Yet one is inseparable from the other, because among believing Yahwists the sacred name of God was always connected with theophany and communion with God. To know the sacred name meant to know God Himself in the dynamic reality of one's relationship with Him. To become the embodied name meant to become God's person absolutely, to the very end - to the extent that human nature allows.

To the end and in fullness, this was achieved in human history by only one person, Jesus, for He was free from sin from the very beginning. For us, all the rest of humanity, one thing remains: to partake of His life, the life of the Kingdom that He brought into our world, which had separated itself from God by the wall of our sin. Discipleship here is not about learning from Him some skills, techniques, or practices (even spiritual or ascetic ones), but about learning a new life. It is about acquiring a new quality of one's own life, because new life becomes real for us only when it becomes ours. It is about learning to abide in the newly acquired life, to preserve it - to preserve it as a state, because this new life cannot become our property, even an acquired one, at least not at the earthly stage of our path. And only then, if we manage to solve this minimum task, will we be able to call ourselves true disciples of our Teacher: disciples for whom the Kingdom and its life are not merely words.