NOTES for Joh 17:6-19
Speaking of His relationship with the disciples, Jesus constantly emphasizes the essential unity that binds them to Him. Moreover, He likens His relationship with His disciples to His relationship with the Father. For Jesus, these are evidently the very same relationship. Or another side of His relationship with His heavenly Father. They are, as it were, two components of the same spiritual process, which forms the spiritual foundation of the Kingdom. And it is precisely Jesus' disciples who remain in the world who constitute the boundary of the Kingdom in the fallen world. It is in them that Jesus is glorified as King of His Kingdom. But this glorification is possible only insofar as they are ‘not of the world’.
Insofar as they belong entirely to their Teacher and His heavenly Father. Not in the sense of a unity of views, but in the sense of a unity of life. That very life of the Kingdom which Jesus bears within Himself in all its fullness. And which He imparted to all of them except one — the one who rejected it himself. Rejected it by rejecting Him. But this is a person's free choice. Those who chose Him faced a new task: to preserve what they had received. Not by withdrawing from the fallen world, but by remaining in it. Yet without giving a place in their hearts and their lives to the evil in which the fallen world lies. Otherwise their lives have no meaning.
If they had all departed, leaving this world, the Kingdom would have departed with them. The Saviour's work would have remained unfinished. But if they had given the evil of this world a place in their lives, His work would simply have failed: for the Kingdom was to enter, and did enter, this world in purity and fullness, without mingling with it or with the evil in which it lies. This does not mean, of course, that an unbridgeable gulf separates the world and the Kingdom, but there is certainly a boundary between them. And the world can cross this boundary only by undergoing a qualitative change.
By becoming different not in its nature, but in the sense of being freed from the power of evil and sin. Of course, in the Kingdom the very nature of the world also changes. But these changes can take place only after the world has been cleansed of evil. That is why Jesus prays to the Father for His disciples, asking Him to keep them from evil rather than take them out of the world. He prays for them as those who will continue what He has begun. Continue it by becoming people of the Kingdom who remain in this world. Those through whom the Kingdom will continue its entry into the world.