“As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.” From John’s Gospel, chapter 17, verse 21.
In the name, etc..
Today’s reading is the conclusion of the long prayer of Jesus, which takes up all of chapter 17. It is a prayer not only for those who are present with him, but also for “those who will believe in me through their word,” as Jesus says, “that they all may be one.” The prayer is one for unity not only of the people immediately around Jesus, but also for that community extended in space and time, and, indeed, extended also in eternity. There is no limit to this prayer. The purpose of the unity, if I can put it that way, is “that the world may believe that you have sent me.”
What is the nature of the unity that Jesus is praying for? How does it help “the world” believe that the Father sent Jesus? And what is the purpose of the unity that Jesus is praying for?
The unity is something deeper than mere agreement or conformity. Nowadays, unity in the church, and among the churches, tends to mean polite acknowledgement of carefully worked out theological and jurisdictional agreements, with the aim of regulating inter-church relationships. Such unity is worth working for, of course, but it is only the beginning of an approach to the kind of unity Jesus is talking about.
The Nicene creed points toward the nature of the unity when it describes Jesus as “God from God, Light from Light...of one Being with the Father.” Father and Son are one in being, in a relationship so close that they are unified in purpose. There is a metaphysical bond between them that is beyond the words that we can come up with to refer to it. The unity is the mystery of the inner life of the Trinity that we are being drawn into, when Jesus prays that we may be one, as the Father and the Son are one.
How does the unity help the world believe that the Father sent Jesus? It helps by revealing that the unity is actually love, when Jesus prays “that you have sent me and loved them even as you have loved me.” The unity, then, is not merely a metaphysical reality, in some remote eternal realm, but a living experience of love into which we are being drawn and in which we can participate. God, in other words, is not remote from us in eternity, but is available to us in a personal experience of love. And he wants that experience of love to be known.
And now to our third question, the purpose of the unity. We’ve already heard it: the love between the Father and the Son. Jesus prays “I made your name known to them...so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” This is the goal of our Christian lives: unity with God in Christ, in love. Every experience of love and unity in this life, is a precursor, a preparation, a hint of the ultimate experience of loving unity with God. It is what the whole human race is called to, and what some people, whom we call saints and mystics, attain to in this life. They remind us, as in fact we remind each other in our eucharistic liturgies all the time, that God in his infinite love has made us for himself. That is the nature, the purpose, of the unity in love which Jesus has revealed to us.
“As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.”
In the name etc..
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