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CHRIST’S PRAYER AND PROMISE OF UNITY FOR US ALL

John 17:1-11 
The Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year A 
Analysis by Louis Moehlman 

1After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, 2since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. 3And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. 4I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. 5So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed. 
6“I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. 7Now they know that everything you have given me is from you, 8for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you, and they have believed that you sent me. 9I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. 10All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I have been glorified in them. 11And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. 

“Whatever unity is being prayed for here is not left unfinished, waiting to be realized by the church. It’s bound to the work that reaches its conclusion in the Cross.”

DIAGNOSIS: Holding it all together… or else 

Step One:  Initial Diagnosis (External Problem) – Get it together, Church 
If there’s a verse we latch onto in this prayer, it’s the last one: “… that they may be one, as we are one” (v. 11). It’s difficult to read the final verse without it becoming the controlling idea for the entire passage. 

We think: There it is. The mission statement. The Marching Orders. The thing we’re supposed to get right as the Church of Christ. Unity. 

Jesus is praying for unity, and if this is the case, then it follows that the church – those who hear this prayer – are to take up the cause. So, we get to work. Programs, councils, denominational statements, ecumenical dialogues. 

We try to make the church look like what we think Jesus is praying for. 

And if we’re honest, that usually means getting people to believe the same things, in the same way, and to participate in the life of the church in ways that make sense to us. Unity, after all, has to look like something. 

And more often than not, it looks like agreement! 

Step Two: Advanced Diagnosis (Internal Problem) – Unity… on my terms 
But it doesn’t take long for us to realize that something is off. 

In Lisbon North Dakota, our home of 1,800 people, there are seven churches in town. Expand that radius a few miles out, and suddenly there are 3-4 more. 

It’s not to say that we’re uninterested in unity. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. We want unity, but we just want it to look a certain way. We want unity that confirms us. We want unity that reinforces what we already believe (and never challenge whether what we believe is truly centered in Christ). It’s the kind of unity that doesn’t ask too much, or disrupts our lives and ways of thinking, or requires us to yield anything. 

Unity only becomes recognizable when it conforms to something that we believe can be identified and maintained. In practice then, it looks less like a gift and promise, and more like a project. 

When our version of unity is threatened, we draw lines, divide, and protect what we’ve built. Because if unity is the thing that Jesus is praying for, then surely, it’s up to us to make it happen at all cost. And we will – on our own terms. 

Step Three: Final Diagnosis (Eternal Problem) – A prayer that exposes us 
But what if this prayer isn’t giving us a task to accomplish? 

At this point, the problem is no longer simply about visible division or even competing definitions of unity. What if Jesus’ prayer is exposing the impossibility of what we think we’re supposed to do? 

Because if unity depends on us – on our ability to get it right; to believe correctly, organize faithfully, and to hold it all together – the evidence is already in. 

We can’t! 

There is no unity across denominations, within congregation, or even within ourselves. We’ve taken what belongs to God and instead have turned it into something that we attempt to produce. 

On our own, not only are we unable to achieve unity, but we are completely reluctant to receive it. We would rather be the authors of unity than be recipients of it. 

It leaves us not unified, but fractured. 

It leaves us not alive, but dying. 

The only unity we seem capable of achieving on our own is unity in decline, exhaustion, and finally, death.  It is only the unity of our failure. 

PROGNOSIS: Given what we cannot make 

Step Four: Initial Prognosis (Eternal Solution): “It is finished.” 
For this, we’ll need to jump back to the beginning of the prayer. Jesus begins by declaring that “the hour has come for the Son to be glorified.” In John’s Gospel, that hour doesn’t lead to a strategy session about how church unity is to come about. It leads to a cross. There, the Son is “glorified” (gori-fied) – not through visible unity, but through suffering, abandonment, and finally through death. The work given to Him is brought to completion not by gathering others into agreement, but by giving himself over entirely for our sake in all our failing before God. And from there comes the Word that actually holds this whole prayer together: “It is finished” (John 19:30). 

With these words, the burden of completion and unity is removed from those who would come after Him. Whatever unity is being prayed for here is not left unfinished, waiting to be realized by the church. It’s bound to the work that reaches its conclusion in the Cross. 

Step Five: Advanced Prognosis (Internal Solution) – The Word that creates what it declares. 
Within the prayer itself, there is a detail that is so easily overlooked: “…for the words that you gave to me, I have given to them…” (v. 8). Before there is any talk of this unity stuff, there is this: a Word that is given. 

They are the words that our church has been proclaiming since Jesus first appeared to the disciples after the resurrection – words that continue to be spoken in the life of the church and words that don’t depend on us and our prior agreement or established unity in order to be effective. 

It’s the word that Jesus declares to the disciples; “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.” (14:27) Or, as we hear during confession and absolution: “In the mercy of almighty God, Jesus Chris was given to die for us; and for his sake God forgives us all our sins.” 

Here, the direction is reversed. Unity does not precede the Word; the Word creates our unity. Unity doesn’t happen in our agreement, but in our trusting Christ’s forgiveness. The same Word is spoken to us all, sinners, fractured, divided and failing. 

And in that Word, we are made one. 

Step Six: Final Prognosis (External Solution) – A different kind of unity 
So, what does unity look like now? 
Well, it doesn’t suddenly erase any division. Denominations still exist. Congregational conflict will continue to persist. The particularities of place – like those in and around Lisbon – do not disappear. 

It looks like people who have nothing in common – nothing, except this: They’ve been given the same Word, the same forgiveness, the same death, and also the same life. 

It looks like a peace that doesn’t depend on agreement, but a life lived within a unity already given, and one that has its source not in the Church itself, but in the already competed work of Christ. 

It looks like the Lutherans and Catholics (of Lisbon) coming together during Holy Week for a community Stations of the Cross to speak that promising word to one another.