John 17

Introduction

• B. F. Westcott calls this the “Prayer of Consecration” (p. 280) and Ernst Kasemann (p. 5) says it parallels Jewish farewell addresses.
  a. Deuteronomy 32-33—Moses’ farewell address.
  b. Apocryphal writings—4 Ezra 8:19ff; Baruch 48; Jubilees of Moses 1; Jubilees of Abraham 20-22; Jubilees of Isaac 36.
  c. The 2nd-century Hermetic writing Poimandres also shows some similarities (e.g., 1:31ff).
• The “History of Religions” school in Germany felt that the Christian movement appropriated pieces of secular and heretical teaching in order to gain access to the pagan world (Moule, p 44-47).
• Did John construct this prayer from other prayers not explicitly recorded?
  a. It appears to be both prospective in terms of future believers (17:20-21) and retrospective in terms of His mission (17:4).
  b. It serves as a report about His mission and as support for His obedience to die.
  c. Some of the Church Fathers, looking back at 11:41-42, refer to this as a “teaching prayer.”
  d. Dodd’s breakdown of the prayer (p. 417-418):
  i. 17:1-5—Praying for Himself.
  ii. 17:6-19—Praying for His disciples.
  iii. 17:20-24—Praying for His future believers.
  iv. 17:25-26—Results of His mission.
  e. 17:5; cf. 1:3 and 10—“World” is used 14 times.
  i. 1 John 2:15-17—The “world” here refers to the organized reality that is set against God.
  ii. John 3:16-17—The concern of the salvific event is the particular point to which the Christian faith is attached (Kierkegaard’s “scandal of particularity” theory).

John 17:1-8

• 17:1; cf. 2:4—The timetable has come to fruition.
• 17:1-2; cf., Luke 9:31-32—“Glorified,” in the Gospels, means that Jesus is being seen for who He really is.
• 17:2—The zoe here is the character of life, not the duration of life (Morris, p. 636-637).
• 17:3—It is through the Cross that the Father and the Son are ultimately revealed.
• 17:4-5—The Cross is not a tactic to attract attention; it is the revelation of God’s true nature.
  a. The Incarnation is the eternal disclosure of God’s goodness (Kung, 1984, p. 437-440).
  b. For some, the Cross is a singular event, where God showed some compassion. For others, the Cross is the ultimate expression of God’s love.
• 17:6-8—The irony is that they do not see and they do not believe, meaning this could have been written in retrospect.

John 17:9-19

• 17:9-10—The disciples are taken into the divine community through the Cross and will become the new Incarnation through the Church (Brown, 1970, p. 763).
• 17:13-15—This “world” is that structure of resistance that is alienated from God (Buber, 1970, p. 143).
  a. Martin Luther says that when the shepherds saw Jesus, they did not build a monastery but returned to their flocks.
  b. This prayer is armor for the early Church against Docetism.

John 17:20-26

• 10:17-18; cf., Hebrews 2:18—Jesus did not have a moral edge over us; He trusts that God would return His life to Him.
• Does knowing the “sign of Jonah,” something He would have learned at synagogue school, mean Jesus knew He would be raised?
  a. When did Jesus know that He was the “Son of Man” and the “Warrior Messiah” (Cullmann, 1963, p. 105-107)?
  b. It is not as if Jesus is following a script but more of playing a role (Wright, 1996, p. 645).
• 17:20-21; cf. 13:34—The “oneness” of the Father and the Son is a “community of love,” which is embodied in the Christian community (Rensberger, p. 147; cf., Talbert, p. 236).
• 17:22-23—The “glory” is to embody the selfless nature of God.
• 17:24—The full disclosure of God will only come through the Cross.
• 17:21-23; cf., 17:11—Unity is instrumental in continuing the tension between the light and the darkness. One of the weaknesses of the Church is that, even early on, it has fragmented into smaller pieces (Morris, p. 649-651; Wright, 2004, p. 99-100).
• What is in competition with God for our adoration and worship?
• 17:25-26—It is not that every Christian thinks alike or confesses the exact same thing, or that we all just get along in love regardless of our differences.
  a. Peter Berger says that ecumenical conversations should only be held between those who practice the faith daily, even if they do not agree with one another (p. 143-145).
  b. H. Richard Niebuhr says that we cannot attack a view until we can argue it as well as those who hold it (p. 1-3).

References

Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967).

Raymond Brown, The Gospel According to John XIII-XXI, Anchor Bible 29a (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970).

Martin Buber, I and Thou (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970).

Oscar Cullmann, The Christology of the New Testament, rev. ed., New Testament Library (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963).

C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (London: Cambridge University Press, 1953).

Ernst Kasemann, The Testament of Jesus: A Study of John in Light of Chapter 17 (London: SCM Press, 1968).

Hans Kung, On Being a Christian (New York: Image Books/Doubleday, 1984).

Leon Morris, The Gospel According to John, rev. ed., New International Commentary on the New Testament 4 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995).

C. F. D. Moule, The Phenomenon of the New Testament, Studies in Biblical Theology, 2nd series, vol. 1 (London: SCM Press, 1967).

H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1951).

David Rensberger, Johannine Faith and Liberating Community (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1988).

Charles H. Talbert, Reading John: A Literary and Theological Commentary on the Fourth Gospel and Johannine Epistles, rev. ed., Reading the New Testament (Macon, GA: Smyth and Helwys, 2005).

B. F. Westcott, Introduction to the Study of the Gospels (New York: Macmillan, 1882).

N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996).

N. T. Wright, John for Everyone, Part Two (Chapters 11-21), 2nd ed., For Everyone Series (London/Louisville: SPCK/Westminster/John Knox Press, 2004).