Commentary on John 17:20-26

Let’s be honest. This excerpt from the Farewell Discourse in John reads like a messy and repetitive word salad. Scholars and preachers throughout history have called this passage in John 17 “Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer,” which makes it sound theologically organized and deeply meaningful, but in reality, our modern brains and contemporary contexts make it difficult to follow its structure or grasp its layered intricacies.

Our confusion is warranted. Scholars have long recognized that the language in the Gospel of John is purposefully unique and multilayered. Experts in sociology and linguistics call this kind of language “antilanguage.”

According to Bruce J. Malina, “Antilanguage” is the language of an “antisociety,” or a society established as an alternative to the greater society around it. Antilanguage serves as an act of resistance against the society at large and produces an alternative reality to that society. The purpose of antilanguage is to maintain inner solidarity within a splinter or sectarian group.¹

In other words, John’s Gospel has its own language world, one that is recognizable to insiders but not outsiders. That language world creates a self-contained reality to maintain unity within the insider group while keeping separation from the outside society. John may seem to be a simple and straightforward Gospel (and it can certainly be read that way) but there is a complex purpose and structure to it that keeps outsiders, including us contemporary readers, at arm’s length from some of its meaning.

There are two techniques employed in antilanguage that can help us unlock pieces of this passage to understand it better—relexicalization and overlexicalization.

Relexicalization is the practice of using familiar words in new ways, usually ways that reflect the vocabulary of an insider group. In John’s Gospel, the insider group is the community (or communities) associated with John and its traditions. First-century history is unrecoverable to us in several ways, so we cannot be 100 percent certain about the group(s) that scholars have called the “Johannine community.” However, considering the kind of language used and stories told in John, both significantly different from the other Gospels, it is likely that the authors and/or recipients of John’s Gospel did belong to a particular Christian community that held a dissenting posture to other Jewish and Christian groups of the time.

So, what words and concepts in John belong to this category of relexicalized words? First, the concept of glory (glorify and glorification) saturates this Gospel and appears in 17:22 (“The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one”) and 17:24 (“I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory”). John uses this term paradoxically, because the word has a positive connotation but it is often used in this Gospel to refer to Jesus’ death. In 13:31, the opening verse of the Farewell Discourse, the term seems to encapsulate the betrayal and denial of his disciples as well as Jesus’ arrest, torture, and death. That doesn’t sound much like glorification.

Another relexicalized concept that carries through the whole Gospel is the idea of Jesus as “sent.” Throughout the Gospel Jesus is described as the one sent from God, and the description often comes from Jesus’ mouth (4:34; 5:23; 6:39; 7:33; and 12:44–45, to name a few instances). Although this concept is foreign to the Synoptic Gospels, it could be argued that John uses “sent” as the key descriptor for Jesus in his Gospel. It appears three times in our passage (17:21, 23, 25) and is key to Jesus’ self-identification here.

The last instance of relexicalizing pertinent to our passage is also the key concept of the excerpt—the idea of “being one” or “being one with.” In the chapters leading up to the Farewell Discourse, Jesus almost exclusively uses this phrase to describe his relationship to the Father—Jesus is one with the Father and does the Father’s work and will (5:17–23; 10:30). Here, the focus shifts and Jesus extends his oneness with the Father to the disciples—“so that they may be one, as we are one” (17:22).

This concept of “being one” also provides an example of the second technique used in antilanguage: overlexicalization. Overlexicalization involves assigning a network of words or phrases to the same concept, effectively repeating that concept using a variety of different metaphors. The idea of “being one” from this passage gets repeated in different ways throughout John and the Farewell Discourse itself. All of the following phrases capture the idea of “being one” with Jesus: “believing in/into Jesus” or “following” him, “abiding in” him or “loving” him, “keeping his word,” “receiving” him or “having” him or “seeing” him.

Extending the idea of being one with Jesus to being one with each other (the central point of our excerpt), these images also communicate “being one”: knowing God and making God’s name known (17:26), loving them “as you have loved me” (17:23, 26), the Father being “in” Jesus and Jesus “in” the disciples (17:21, 23).

So, how do antilanguage, relexicalization, and overlexicalization help us interpret this passage? They give us the background necessary to understand that we are outsiders looking in on a closed language system and group. Countless interpreters throughout church history have come to this passage to defend the unity of the church universal, but if John’s community was an antisociety and their language was meant to unify within while separating from other religious groups of the time, then we may need to rethink what “being one” means in the context of the High Priestly Prayer and in our own.

 Notes

1. Bruce J. Malina has produced many academic works on the sociolinguistics of biblical literature, especially John’s Gospel, but the bulk of them are behind a paywall, accessible only through libraries. For an online summary of his work on John’s language, see https://www.earlychristianwritings.com/info/john-maverick.html.