NOTES for Joh 17:1-13

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.

Reading today's passage from the Gospel of John, one wants, following Pilate and his question "What is truth?" (John 18:38), to ask: what is eternal life?

And indeed, it is hard to count the people who have ever been occupied by this question. Only God, who knows even the number of stars in the sky, can do that. And in answer to this question Jesus will answer us today with the words: "And this is eternal life, that they know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent" (John 17:3).

He may not say them directly to us, but we can hear them, like Jesus' disciples, in His conversation with the Father. Through the Holy Spirit, people are shown the Lord's desire that every person come to Him and enter into a relationship of love with Him. And in these very words one can see that this desire fills the Trinity: the desire that every person "know" the true God and Jesus Christ whom He sent.

"Perfect joy": today we read about it, and this word is a unique revelation to John the Theologian. He uses it four times: here, 15:11, 16:24, 1 John 1:4. That means it is very important to him. What, then, is perfect joy? A priest, when asked about this, told the following story. One evening he was returning home, and young men attacked him, beat him, took his money, and crushed his glasses. Without money and glasses he could get home only by a miracle. And he remembers that while they were beating him, he felt perfect joy. This story can cause incomprehension and rejection in many people. But this is in no way joy at the thought of how great I am because I was found worthy of suffering. Many will understand it that way. No. In no case. Here there is something entirely different. An entirely different joy. With caution, understanding all the incompleteness of words, let us say: the joy of entrusting oneself into God's hands. One can hear that "perfect joy" is a kind of spiritual rapture from God's nearness. Something like what is described in the remarkable poem by K. R.: There are bright moments:
The earth is so incomparably good.
And the soul is full of unearthly delight.
To the Creator of worlds a fragrance
The flower bears, and the bird gives a song:
His creation thanks the Creator.
Oh, if only one could merge as one
With flower and bird and all the earth
And with them, as they do, pray one prayer;
Without words, without thought, without request,
To burn in soul with trembling rapture
And in life-filled forgetfulness to revere.
Is this "perfect joy"? It seems, still, that it is not. For almost everyone has experienced this state; it is easily attainable under the right conditions, whereas every perfection, on the contrary, is inaccessible, and one can only reach toward it with one's whole soul. That is why, it seems to us, the testimony of the priest whose story we gave at the beginning is deeply true.

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).

The Lord Jesus says several times in John's Gospel that He came so that the people who hear His message, His disciples, might believe and have the life that He brought from the Father. Therefore, in His final prayer before His arrest, He prays for the disciples and their followers, not for the world, not for those who did not receive Him.

At the same time, however, He also prays for the world, indirectly, that the world may believe in Him when it sees the unity of the disciples. In this way, He expects from those who have believed in Him the continuation of His work: to contribute to the salvation and enlivening of the whole world, not by replacing Christ, but by manifesting His presence in their unity, which bears witness that they already live divine life, imitating the inimitable unity of the Father and the Son.

We all know that Jesus came into this world and became human. And that means the Lord came to know all the weaknesses of our bodily existence; He experienced for Himself what it is to thirst and hunger, to freeze and languish from heat, to suffer and to take pleasure in tasty food. And all this was so that no person could reproach Him: "You are my God, who sent me into this cruel world, but You Yourself have not experienced everything that I have had to experience!" We have the opportunity to look at Jesus, to see how He teaches, interacts with the disciples, breaks bread, and suffers. And most often some very, very serious image appears before us. But this means that we do not see everything, or do not want to see it; it is simpler and somehow more proper for us, perhaps, to see God in exactly that way.

And yet the Lord is a God who rejoices. And He rejoices not merely in some material things, as is characteristic of all of us, but with perfect joy. He Himself speaks of this joy in addressing the Father and asks for such joy for all of us as well (see John 17:13). He rejoices that He is one with the Father and is going to Him. And this means that our joy too will be perfect precisely when He Himself, with His joy, comes to us and makes His dwelling with us (see John 14:23).

In this passage Jesus once again says that His followers, like Himself, are “not of the world.” Christians are called to live according to the Beatitudes, which do not fit at all with customary notions of earthly success. What the Lord calls us to does not guarantee universal recognition, wealth, or prosperity. Here He speaks of an entirely different reward—His “perfect joy,” for the sake of which the Lord “consecrates Himself.” He goes to the sacrifice of the Cross so that we may be bearers of joy in this world that rejects Him.

Jesus' disciples are called to live in this difficult world without trying to avoid everything that does not correspond to their ideas of what is right. How often, when we encounter something unchristian, do we try not to see it and ask God to remove it from our field of vision. Yet Christ clearly prayed to the Father not that He take us out of the world, but that He “keep us from evil.”