Commentary on John 17:1-11

This text is a prayer of Jesus, and it comes near the end of the lengthy Farewell Discourse (13:31–17:26) in the Gospel of John. While Jesus admonishes simplicity when he speaks about and models prayer in Matthew 6, this prayer is thick with theological symbols, recapitulating many themes encountered throughout the Fourth Gospel. Alan Culpepper names chapter 17 as “theologically … one of the most important chapters in the Gospel.”¹

It may not make for the best sermon on how to pray. Instead, it may be better preached as a window into the heart of Jesus displaying for all disciples the intimate bonds of love that connect the Father, the Son, disciples from age to age, and all flesh, being caught up in the life of God now and forever.

The homiletical question, then, becomes: How does this prayer of Jesus for his disciples shape and inform the lives of those who continue to follow him?

Living between times

In the narrative time of the Gospel, Jesus is at the table with his disciples. (We may have forgotten this because they entered the Last Supper scene all the way back in chapter 13.) But in the theological time of the text, a post-resurrection Jesus speaks a prayer over his disciples from age to age (future disciples enter the prayer at 17:20).

The verb tenses alternate between future and past in the prayer, making it hard to distinguish between the words of the pre-resurrection Jesus in the narrative time of the text and the post-resurrection Jesus in the lived time of the hearers/readers.

As an example of this slippage back and forth between tenses and times, in verse 4 we have a declaration of Jesus having finished the work that the Father gave him to do, though in narrative time, “It is finished,” doesn’t come until 19:30.

In the contemporary life of discipleship, we, too, live our lives caught between the pre-resurrection and post-resurrection realities. How would the disciples around the table hearing this prayer understand words like “Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed” (17:5), where they sat in that moment—before betrayal, before trial, before crucifixion, before resurrection?

How do we hear the promises of Jesus spoken in this prayer where we sit now? Alternating between future and past tenses in our own life, the pre-resurrection prayers and post-resurrection promises also catch us up in a spiral of time akin to “eternal life.”

Eternal life, now

Eternal life plays a significant theological role throughout the Fourth Gospel. But our contemporary theological notions of what eternal life means can become unhelpful when overlaid on John’s much richer understanding of the term.

As Mary Coloe explains it, “As Son, he reveals God’s love for the world and God’s desire to draw all into God’s own eternity life, which is to participate in the very being of God.”² (She uses “eternity life” to emphasize a different quality of life, rather than simply the elongation of it.) Or, in the words of David Ford, “I have read the whole Gospel as an invitation to enter into a relationship of trusting Jesus, with continuing ‘life in his name’ involving an ongoing drama of desiring, learning, praying, and loving in community, for the sake of God’s love for the world.”³

John uses other language that may also be helpful in preaching depth into the notion of “eternal life,” like “abiding” in Jesus (see John 15). Jesus’s preaching of “eternal life,” “abiding,” “dwelling,” et cetera is an intensely relational life of love that disciples are invited into now, not just in the hereafter.

We’ve often mistakenly allowed “eternal life” to relativize our experience of the here-and-now, diminishing its significance in a life of abiding in Jesus. But Jesus’s words offer another relativization: that of identity, not of time.

Ford points to the use of “authority” [Greek exousia] in 17:2 and its relationship to the same word used in 1:12: “he gave the power [exousia] to become children of God.”⁴ Our identity as children of God, afforded by the authority of the logos in the primordial words of the prologue, is the marker of our lives bound up in eternal life with God, now.

Abiding in Jesus is not biding our time until we can escape our life in the world. When we preach “eternal life” in the Fourth Gospel, we need not diminish our relationship to the present time, as that life begins now with a new identity and profound intimacy of relationship with God.

Authority over all flesh

Verse 2 reads, “You have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him.” But the word for “people” here, in the Greek, is sarx (“flesh”).

That’s a more expansive term than words that designate humans only. And while it’s translated “people” here, we might play with this language a bit to see what else “authority over all flesh, to give eternal life” might mean, especially if we are helping others to expand their notion of eternal life to encompass relationality and abiding in the life of God. Our ecological kin are also implicated in this heaven/earth, divine/flesh dwelling in the here-and-now intimacy of being caught up in the life of God now and forever.

Take courage

Just prior to the start of this passage, Jesus says to the disciples, “The hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, each one to his home, and you will leave me alone. … In the world you face persecution, but take courage: I have conquered the world!” (16:32–33).

Before we get to the theological richness of the prayer, we begin with stark words of the present situation. And as the final words of Jesus before the passion, this passage reaches a theological climax just before a plunging descent into betrayal and arrest, trial and crucifixion in the very next chapters.

At the very end of the prayer, not included in this day’s Gospel reading, Jesus ends with the comforting words, “I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them and I in them” (17:26).

Notes

1. R. Alan Culpepper, The Gospel and Letters of John (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), 219.
2. Mary L. Coloe, John 1–10, Wisdom Commentary (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2021), 461.
3. David F. Ford, The Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), 337.
4. Ford, The Gospel of John, 334.