John 17:20-26 (NRSV Updated Edition)
“I ask not only on behalf of these but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.
“Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you, and these know that you have sent me. 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.”
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"In his prayer in the garden (John 17) Jesus anticipates that his disciples will share in the divine life. “That they may be in us, just as you are in me and I am in you, Father.” This subjectivity is the appropriation of the life we know from the Gospel tradition, now enfleshed in our very own existence. If in the Gospels we may speak of the objective Life of Jesus (the “so-called” historical Jesus), so by the gift of the Spirit we may also speak of the subjective life of Jesus in us (the Present Christ or the 'Christus Praesens'). The life we now live is lived in Jesus. He is the vine and we are the branches (John 15:1-9).
"Where the vine ends and the branches begin is not possible to tell. So it is with us. This is the secret of Christian existence. We are not merged with Jesus so that we may confuse our identity with him, anymore than he is merged with the Father and so loses his identity. To suggest such is to end in a metaphysical miasma and psychological grandiosity. Rather, inasmuch as we imitate Jesus by living in love, as he imitated his Abba and lived in love, we become like him."
- Michael Hardin, The Jesus Driven Life, pg. 269
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"[T]hrough the Trinity we transcend us-them, in-out thinking. Imprisoned in our old familiar dualistic thinking, we were always dividing the world into mine and yours, one and other, same and different, better and worse. In the Trinity, we move beyond that dualism so that mine and yours are reconciled into ours. One and other are transformed into one another. Same and different are harmonized without being homogenized or colonized. Us and them are united without loss of identity and without dividing walls of hostility. To put it in philosophical terms, dualism doesn't regress to monism. It is transcended.
"The healing teaching of Trinity also helps us transcend top-down or hierarchical understandings of God. If God's Father-ness elevates and includes Son-ness in full equality, do you see what that means? If God's Son-ness doesn't grasp at equality, but rather mirrors the Father's self-giving and self-emptying love, do you see what that means? If the Spirit is not subordinated as an inferior but is honored and welcomed as equal, do you see what that means? God is characterized by equality, empathy, and generosity rather than subordination, patriarchy, and hierarchy."
- Brian McLaren, We Make the Road By Walking, pp. 228-29
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"No doubt you're aware that many traditional Christians today consider the concept of universal anything — including salvation — heresy. Many do not even like the United Nations. And many Catholics and Orthodox Christians use the lines of ethnicity to determine who's in and who's out. I find these convictions quite strange for a religion that believes that “one God created all things.” Surely God is at least as big and mysterious as what we now know the shape of the universe to be - a universe that is expanding at ever faster speeds, just like the evolution of consciousness that has been proceeding for centuries. How can anyone read the whole or even a small part of John 17 and think either Christ or Jesus is about anything other than unity and union? “Father, may they all be one...”"
- Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ, pg. 49
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In his video homily for this Sunday (link below), James Alison explains how the phrase “before the foundation of the world” refers to the Holy Place (Holy of Holies) in the Jewish temple, as it was thought of as being outside of Creation (both space and time), where YHWH dwells. This links to the following from his book Jesus the Forgiving Victim, (Essay 6, “Undergoing Atonement: The Reverse Flow Sacrifice.”):
"[T]here is the High Priest, in the Holy Place, with us outside, and he is being ministered to by Angels, he is communing with the Angels who were with YHWH at the beginning of creation. He is spending time in prayer, for it is during this period that he will expect to become interpenetrated by YHWH whom he is going to incarnate for the rest of the rite. So he will pray to become one with God, and that God will become one with him, so that he can perform the sacrifice and glorify God by making God's people one. This is what At-one-ment is all about. Experts in these matters have long known that in John 17, where Jesus engages in a long prayer concerning the Father being in him, and he in the Father, and him praying that his disciples may be made one, we have the essence of the High Priestly prayer in the Atonement rite. So we can imagine the ancient High Priest praying in these terms, and becoming interpenetrated by YHWH." (pp. 247-48)
In the homily, Alison proceeds:
"[H]ere we have one of the things that Jesus is repeating from the Atonement rite, “at-one-ment” rite, which is the time when everything becomes one. The prophet Zechariah even says, “On that day God will be One.” There is the sense that creation is a dispersed reality that hasn't yet achieved One-ness, and that the power of the Creator tends to making things one.
"And that can be quite a frightening thing for us. “One” can be a way of making everyone fit into the same 'little hut' - can be a reductive thing. But it's quite obvious that Jesus's understanding of the way in which God makes them one is an ever-greater, it's one in the non-mathematical sense. [It] is of so much diversity that harmoniously works together that we are able to rejoice in being brought into it. That the Father is in Jesus, the Spirit which is being given is in both of them and is shared with us so that we find ourselves actually coming alive in them. It's “being inhabited” by something. It imagines us as malleable, not as individuals with individual spirits but as malleable inter-dividuals ... who are able to be possessed by evil desires and spirits coming from others, but also able to be inhabited, indwelt, by The Spirit which is making us, with all our distractions and separations, revenges and rivalries, is turning into One.
[...]
"[T]he whole of this is to produce people that are able to bear witness to love. That's how we know that it is of God. Titles, authority, none of those things are at the beginning of a hint of as much importance as this: are we in any sense at all dilators, symptoms, of God's love? Or are we people who think that the love is only for me and not something that I receive from others and I'm able to share with others?
[...]
"From generation to generation we are in the same place, this upper room which is also the Holy of Holies, with the Holy One who is giving himself so that we can learn always to detect where he is. He's going to look different, our imitation of it is going to be flexible, from generation to generation, but this is the witness that we're going to bear. ... [And] this plan precedes everything. This is not a reactive plan, this project of opening up creation through including us and bringing us into the possibility of discovering what is true, how things really are, what the way that the whole pattern of creation really works is. Being on the inside of that, that is what he wanted from the word go.
[...]
"The whole purpose of this was to enter that place so as to reveal what the heart of the Creator of all things is, in such a way that we might be contaminated by it ... that it may be contagious among us, so that we too can start to bear witness to what really is.
- James Alison, from video "Homily for Seventh Sunday in Easter 2022 C" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exYAhK2EVqE)
[Source of book quotes from Michael Hardin, Brian McLaren, Richard Rohr and James Alison, and for further discussion and reflection on this week's lectionary texts: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/easter7c/]
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