Gospel Reading: John 17:20-26
For Sunday, May 12, 2013—Easter 7
The "heart of the Gospel," the "culmination of John’s message," where we find all the major themes coming together in Jesus’ "central teaching for the church," the "summation"—these are the ways that interpreters describe the seventeenth chapter of the fourth gospel, so it must be really important.
The only problem is that it is really confusing and I am not completely sure I know what it means. I don’t mean that, given what it says, I am not sure how to interpret it. I mean, I do not always understand the sentences that are formed by the words which are strung together.
Three and a Half Chapters
Condemned to use figurative language; this is an attempt to use worldly words to describe other-worldly realities. This sort of how New Testament scholar Bill Countryman puts it, but his words are confusing too.
The six verses set out for this Sunday’s Gospel reading are the conclusion of a chapter long prayer, which comes at the end of a three chapter long farewell address by Jesus—there’s plenty of confusion to be found in all this. Trying to read this text in light of the three and a half chapters that precede it is what makes these final verses so hard to comprehend. But, maybe, that’s just me.
Mysterious Redundancy
I am so confused, and disengaged as a result, that I am just not paying attention by the time I get there. The three-chapter farewell address is literally (and by that I don’t mean figuratively) the same message repeated three times. There is some evidence that it is actually three different written versions of the same thing stuck together.
Maybe the redactor that was working on the gospel of John put all three chapters in and was going to decide later which the best version to include was. Then maybe that redactor was called out to work on the Prologue and didn’t really bring his replacement up to speed; so all three were just left in there. Or maybe it is all intentional, but the purpose is a mystery.
Why So Incomprehensible?
I want to embrace the mystical. I am trying. But does the mystical have to be incomprehensible?
Mysticism of every variety is filled with coded language and symbols that are only understandable to those inducted into that particular truth or way of knowing. It seems clear that John’s gospel is written for such a community and that approaching it from outside of that community or trying to unlock its deepest meanings with Biblical interpretive methods will never be completely fruitful.
Two broad strokes that I can comprehend are glory and unity. Jesus is praying for his disciples and says not once, but maybe even several times, that it is the unity of his followers will revel Jesus’ glory to the world. “The glory that you have given me, I have given them and I am in them so they are one and because they are one the world will know that you sent me.” That is what Jesus says.
The Hardest Question
If those (us?) who self identify as Christians can be included in as the “them,” and the glory that the Father gave to Jesus and which Jesus gave to us produces in us unity, and that unity reveals the glory of Jesus to the world—then something went wrong.
Where is there any evidence that Christians display a unity to the world that reveals the glory of God through Jesus Christ?
Russell Rathbun is a preacher at House of Mercy in St. Paul, Minnesota, the author of Midrash on the Juanitos (Cathedral Hill Press, 2010) and the curator of The Hardest Question.
