John 17:1-11 (NRSV Updated Edition)
After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.
“I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything you have given me is from you, for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you, and they have believed that you sent me. I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I have been glorified in them. And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”
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"The original Reformation was all about discovering God anew as a God of grace. But, as they say, the proof is in the pudding. Five hundred years of subsequent history has shown those efforts to have largely failed. A God of grace must be a God who is completely nonviolent, and a God who produces true Oneness. As John puts it, “This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in God there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). The Reformation never came close to achieving this pinnacle of a nonviolent God. Reformation churches soon promulgated wars and various forms of violence, using God to justify it. It produced the same old kind of oneness based on Us-against-Them ... now formulated as Protestants vs. Catholics.
"Theologically, Protestantism landed squarely with the ultimate dualistic god, who instead of “creating one new humanity in place of the two” (the clear results of a gracious God proclaimed in Eph. 2), proclaims a god who eternally divides humanity into two — believers and unbelievers, the saved and the damned, those who go to heaven and those who go to hell. Instead of seeing in the Crucified God a gracious God who is launching a renewal of creation and healing of humanity, Protestant theology landed with its abhorrent penal substitutionary atonement theory of a wrathful God who sacrifices the Son in order to save a few believing souls for heaven. After a century of World Wars, it’s no wonder that people are fleeing churches in rapidly increasing numbers.
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"In John 17, Jesus prays “that they may be one as we are one.” Do we realize how much the true God, whose Oneness offers gracious healing to all our human divisions, requires atheism toward all our well-entrenched gods of dualism? To me this is the fundamental issue of coming to true “faith” — faithfulness to Jesus’s Father, the nonviolent God of love. It begs for an anthropology that helps us to more full understand how humanity has become entrenched in experiences of dualistic gods.
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"Ever since our origins as a species our experience has been that the gods have taught us, commanded us, to think dualistically and to so order our communities and cultures. When the Human One comes along and prays, “May they be one as we are one,” it is not necessarily jolting yet. Our gods have always given Us oneness ... a blessed unity that we maintain against Them. In short, a false dualistic oneness.
"But what happens next after Jesus’s prayer makes all the difference in the world. The Human One lets himself be victim to our sacrifice and then is raised with the a message of forgiveness, not vengeance. He lets himself be pushed out as an outsider, one of Them, to begin breaking down the barriers of Us and Them. His Father and the Spirit of Truth represent a Oneness that transcends the dualisms. There is no longer Us and Them. There is only Us. This is a brand new Oneness. A wholly different God."
- Paul J. Nuechterlein, from Opening Reflections on the Girardian Lectionary page for Easter 7A (link below)
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"[...] Jesus' real concern is that people should know the Father, not him. At the same time he is aware that he is revealing the Father, and that it is only through him that a real knowledge of the Father is made available. That is: it is only in seeing the pattern of Jesus' life, lived with the intelligence of the victim, that it becomes possible to know the Father, who is revealed only in the casting out. Let me try to make that clearer. The whole process of Jesus life, leading up to and including his death, is what defines who the Father is. This is because the life is lived in obedient response to the Father's love, and is an exact imitation of the Father’s love lived out in the conditions of the human race. The imitation reveals the one imitated. It was Jesus' life and death that made possible the human discovery of who the Father really is.
"So, Jesus makes himself known, not as an end in himself, but strictly as the means of revealing the Father. His famous response to Philip in John 14 says exactly this: “I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me.” What Jesus is, he is as revealing the Father. Later on, this is made clearer still when Jesus says, “and this is eternal life, that they know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou has sent.” (John 17.3)."
- James Alison, Knowing Jesus, pg. 109
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"Again, what I want to bring out is this wonderful tabletop intimacy between Jesus talking to his Father in the presence of the disciples and sharing how they are all in this together. “All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I have been glorified in them” [v.10] This is an amazing thing. Jesus is prepared to allow himself to be glorified in us, meaning we are going to become bearers of his glory, witnesses to what God is really all about, witnesses to what the real order of creation ... is, witnesses of course from the moment that Jesus is seated at the right hand of God and the power of the realigned creation flows into us.
"... So he's praying that the Holy Spirit come down upon us all, so that we may be kept together in this project of being amazing. Given what fallible, screwed up people we are, [it's] amazing that we are being given the power and strength actually to become part of what the life of God really is, as shown by Jesus, which we find ourselves invited into. So much to think about, so much intimacy to begin to prepare for, as we wait for the Spirit to come upon us at Pentecost."
- James Alison, from video "Homily for Seventh Sunday of Easter Year A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB1MBAHU928)
[Source of quotes by Paul J. Nuechterlein and from James Alison's Knowing Jesus, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday: http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/easter7a/]
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