The Bible for beginners for 24 December 2026

King James Version (en)

John, Chapter 17

¹ Christ prayeth to his Father to glorify him, ⁶ to preserve his apostles, ¹¹ in unity, ¹⁷ and truth, ²⁰ to glorify them and all other believers with him in heaven

¹These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee:

²As thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him.

³And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.

⁴I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.

⁵And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.

⁶I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world: thine they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have kept thy word.

⁷Now they have known that all things whatsoever thou hast given me are of thee.

⁸For I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me.

⁹I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me; for they are thine.

¹⁰And all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified in them.

¹¹And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are.

¹²While I was with them in the world, I kept them in thy name: those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition; that the scripture might be fulfilled.

¹³And now come I to thee; and these things I speak in the world, that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves.

¹⁴I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.

¹⁵I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil.

¹⁶They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.

¹⁷Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.

¹⁸As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world.

¹⁹And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth.

²⁰Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word;

²¹That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.

²²And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one:

²³I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.

²⁴Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me: for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world.

²⁵O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee: but I have known thee, and these have known that thou hast sent me.

²⁶And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them.

NOTES

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).

In today's reading Jesus prays to the Father for His Church. And the main thing He asks for is unity. Today, two thousand years later, we see that those who believed through the word of the apostles, believers in Christ, are not united. How many barriers and partitions there are among us! And it is no accident that Jesus says...

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.

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