Chapter seventeen in the Gospel of John is one long continuous prayer that Jesus prays to God. Apparently it’s the longest recorded prayer of Jesus, and it takes place immediately before Jesus goes out with his disciples across the Kidron valley to the Garden of Gethsemane, where he is of course arrested and taken away to be tried and executed.
The prayer begins with Jesus reflecting on his ministry, especially on his teaching of the disciples, and on the fact that he has completed the mission God gave him to do, and in so doing has made God known to the disciples and others in the world.
Jesus then prays for the disciples, an activity that accounts for the largest section of the prayer. As a result of his impending death, Jesus is about to leave the disciples, and he is concerned for their wellbeing. He asks God to protect them, noting that the disciples don’t belong to the world, but that they are in the world. They don’t belong to the world because they have been set apart from the world as a consequence of having accepted the teaching of Jesus.
Jesus doesn’t ask God to save them by removing them from the world, because of course they have a job to do. They are to continue the work that he started, that is, they are to continue to proclaim the kingdom of God to the world. In order to do that, they need to be “in” the world, not removed from it. But they also need to be protected from the forces that oppose good in the world, which Jesus identifies as the “evil one” a reference of course to Satan or the devil.
Jesus goes on to say that just as God sent him into the world to carry out the mission God had given him, he himself has now sent the disciples into the world to continue his mission in the ministry that each of them has been given. Jesus then asks God to make the disciples holy, by giving them the strength and courage to reflect the moral character of Jesus in their own lives.
Christians in the twenty-first century are in a similar situation to these early disciples of Jesus. We live in a world that is becoming more secular with each passing day, a world whose values (wealth, power, status, and the priority of the individual) are very different to those of the Christian faith. We are called to be “apart” from the world. We are called to live out our own values and not to succumb to the values of the secular society.
The prayer that Jesus prayed to God for his disciples in the first century, is just as relevant for his disciples in the twenty-first century. We need strength and courage to reflect the moral character of Jesus in our lives, just as much as the early disciples needed strength and courage to reflect it in their lives.
