The Son Prays for the People His Word Will Gather

Jesus lifted his eyes the same way before calling Lazarus out of the tomb (11:41). “Father” opens the prayer and is repeated six times in it, twice with a title attached. The hour that was “not yet come” at Cana (2:4) is now simply “come”.

“All flesh” is the Hebrew idiom kol basar, the whole human race, as in Isaiah 40:5. “As many as thou hast given him” is a neuter singular in Greek, literally “all that thou hast given him”, treating the given people first as one whole gift before they are counted as individuals.

The compound name “Jesus Christ” appears in the Book of John only here and in the prologue (1:17), and never elsewhere on Jesus’ lips. For that reason many readers take the phrase as the Book of John’s own wording of the prayer. “The only true God” sounds the note of the Shema.

“Finished” is teleioo, the verb Jesus used at the well in Samaria: “My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work” (4:34). Its near cousin teleo will be his last word from the cross, “It is finished” (19:30).

The same preposition, para, is used twice: glorify me “with thine own self”, the glory I had “with thee”. It means beside, in the presence of. The Book of John has already said that Isaiah saw his glory (12:41), so the claim of glory before the world is not new in the book, only now spoken to the Father.

In Hebrew thought a name stood for the person as he makes himself known, as when the LORD proclaims his name to Moses in Exodus 34:5-7. “Thine they were” sets their belonging to the Father before their belonging to the Son; the disciples were never ownerless.

Only hours earlier the disciples said “Now are we sure that thou knowest all things” (16:30), and Jesus met it with “Do ye now believe?” Here, speaking to the Father, he credits what they have grasped, that everything he has comes from the Father.

Three verbs of reception follow each other: they received the words, they knew surely, they believed. “Surely” is alethos, truly. The words given are rhemata, the spoken sayings, as though each one passed from Father to Son to disciple like a parcel.

The Greek makes “I” emphatic: I, for them, am asking. Since the sixteenth century the chapter has been called the High Priestly Prayer, after the Lutheran theologian David Chytraeus, because a priest interceded for his own people before the altar, and this verse is where the intercession begins.

The first half is something any worshipper can say to God: all mine are thine. The second half turns it round, thine are mine, which no creature could say. The Greek is neuter, “all my things”, the whole estate of the Son laid open to the Father and claimed back.

“Holy Father” occurs nowhere else in the New Testament. The oldest manuscripts read “keep them in thy name which thou hast given me”, so the Father’s name has itself been given to the Son; the King James follows a text that shifts that clause onto the disciples.

Two verbs of keeping: the first, tereo, is watchful care, the second, phylasso, is a guard’s word, as a sentry keeps a gate. There is also a pun: none of them “perished”, apoleto, except the son of “perishing”, apoleia. The Scripture in view is likely Psalm 41:9, quoted at 13:18.

“These things I speak in the world” means the prayer is spoken aloud to be overheard. At the tomb of Lazarus Jesus had said the same of his prayer: “because of the people which stand by I said it” (11:42). The disciples are meant to be listening.

In verse 8 the gift was the “words”, rhemata, many sayings; here it is “thy word”, logos, singular, the whole message at once. The world’s hatred is a Greek aorist, stated as an event already happened, although the persecutions of the Book of Acts lie ahead.

“From the evil” can be neuter, evil in general, or masculine, the evil one. 1 John 5:18-19 uses the same Greek for “that wicked one” in whom the whole world lies. The request echoes the last line of the Lord’s Prayer, and the same ambiguity sits there.

The line repeats the last clause of verse 14 word for word, turning it into a refrain. The Greek preposition is ek, out of: they do not have their origin in the world, even though the next request sends them straight back into it.

“Sanctify”, hagiazo, is the verb the Greek Old Testament uses for consecrating priests to serve at the altar (Exodus 28:41). “Thy word is truth” is close to Psalm 119:142, “thy law is the truth”, and to David’s prayer, “thy words be true” (2 Samuel 7:28).

“Have I sent” is an aorist, spoken as if already done, though the formal sending comes only after the resurrection: “as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you” (20:21). The prayer speaks of the commission before the commissioning.

“For their sakes” is hyper auton, the preposition of the good shepherd laying down his life for the sheep (10:11) and of Caiaphas’ one man dying for the people (11:50). John Chrysostom read “I sanctify myself” as “I offer myself as a sacrifice”.

The Greek has “those believing”, a present participle, so people who do not yet believe are spoken of as if already there. “Through their word” is singular: the future church is traced to the apostles’ one message.

The Latin of the opening words, ut omnes unum sint, became a watchword of twentieth-century efforts at church unity; John Paul II took the title of his 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint from this prayer. The verse gives unity a hearer outside the room: “that the world may believe.”

The glory is described as given already, in a Greek perfect. The prologue said “we beheld his glory” when the Word dwelt among them (1:14), so the glory in view seems to be God’s presence made visible in Jesus, now shared with the disciples, though readers have debated exactly what it consists of.

“Made perfect in one” uses teleioo, the verb for the finished work of verse 4: they are to be brought to completion into oneness. The last clause gives the Father’s love for the disciples the same measure as his love for the Son, “as thou hast loved me.”

The verb changes. Until now Jesus has said “I pray”; here he says “I will”, thelo, the language of a man stating his wishes. “The foundation of the world” is a phrase the New Testament shares with Ephesians 1:4 and 1 Peter 1:20.

Verse 11 called on the “Holy Father”; the prayer now closes with “righteous Father”, the one who judges rightly between a world that has not known him and a small group that has. Three kinds of knowing are lined up: the world’s lack of it, the Son’s, and the disciples’.

“Declared” is gnorizo, the verb of 15:15, “I have made known unto you”. “And will declare it” looks past the prayer to the cross and to the Spirit’s teaching. The whole farewell discourse, from chapter 13 onward, ends on the words “I in them”.