John 17:6-12 Jesus' prayer for unity

John 17:6-12 Jesus now turns from glory to the name of the Father. Jesus manifested the Father's name to the disciples, and kept them in His name while He was on the earth, and now He asks the Father to continue to keep them in His name after Jesus leaves the world. The name of the Father is not a magical incantation to grant special powers or answered prayer to the one who says it. Jesus has a specific understanding of what it means to keep His disciples in the Father's name. It means that they believed that Jesus came from the Father and that everything He said and did was also from the Father. They understood the unity between Jesus and the Father. And so Jesus' request to the Father is that they continue to be united with each other in continuing to believe in Jesus' unity with the Father. Jesus had succeeded in His mission, except that Judas had been lost, but that was according to the foreknowledge of Father as manifested in the prophets. (John 17:12, a reference to Psalm 41:9).

          It is probably fair to believe that this prayer is not just for the disciples in the room on that occasion, but that Jesus was also praying for all of His followers through the ages. And generally, believers through the ages to the present time have believed that the words that He gave were in fact the words of God. It is only in recent times, since the 19th century, that some theologians began to teach that only some of Jesus' words came from the Father. But more troubling is that Jesus' prayer that His followers be one just as He and the Father are one has not been answered.

          We could, I suppose, make this into a tautology, that only those who believe everything Jesus said came from the Father and also are united with all other believers are those that God has chosen to be the property of Jesus. But that effectively changes this from a petition to God into a statement of conditions for being Jesus' disciple. It seems to run counter to Jesus' intention in this prayer. Perhaps there might be some underlying connection between doubting the words of Jesus and the dissolution of the unity of believers. But the timing seems wrong. The so-called higher criticism surfaced in the 19th century but the western church was torn apart in the 15th and 16th centuries. The deeper connection seems to be that the church leadership from 1470-1530 lived in a manner that totally denied the words of Jesus and became effectively of the world, and not of Christ. (See, for example, Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly for a description of how corrupt church leaders provoked the protestant secession.) This suggests that the interior connection here is that those who receive and believe the words of Jesus, and take them seriously enough to actually do what He says to do, will be united in Spirit with each other as well as with the Father and with Jesus. But as for those who would use Jesus' name or abscond with the authority of the Father in order to do their own thing, or advance their own agenda under false pretenses, well, the unity thing isn't going to happen.

          There is another possible interpretation of the unity that Jesus prayed for. The Father and Jesus are two people. Perhaps this prayer is really focused on small groups of believers. Jesus prayed for His disciples, of whom eleven remained with Him. The kind of unity that He and the Father had could possibly be viewed as impractical for large numbers of people or large organizations. One interpretation of this would be that Jesus was praying for the groups of two or three that gather in His name. (Matthew 18:20) If that is the case, what does this kind of unity look like? Perhaps it is the unity of common beliefs, common goals, shared experiences, shared suffering. Such unity is possible as the elemental basis of the church. It wouldn't happen in large church services, but in small groups, in families or groups of close friends with a common faith, who live their lives together. In the case of the eleven disciples, the book of Acts records theirs lives, daily meeting for prayer and fellowship. As the church grew, people met in each other’s' houses, which couldn't have been very large groups. Perhaps this lifestyle was the obvious (to them) context in which Jesus' prayer for unity was answered.

          In mentioning the betrayal of Judas, there seems a strong suggestion of foreknowledge in Jesus' statement that He had kept those God had given Him. Judas had heard and seen everything that the other disciples had, yet he had chosen a path of treason. Perhaps he had not intended to go that path at the beginning, but Jesus' statement makes it clear that these events had been foreknown and recorded in the scripture. Judas is called the son of destruction. Whether that refers to his own destruction or his attempt to destroy Jesus, or a spiritual inheritance from the destroyer, calling him a son of that suggests that he was never one whom the Father had given Jesus. So it would not have been possible for Jesus to keep him in the name of the Father, because he was never really there in the first place.