A publicly articulated prayer teaches something about what that person considers important. We are privileged to listen in on what God the Son is saying to God the Father before going to die.īut prayers also teach because they articulate earnest desire.
#UNITY CHURCH OF CHRISTIANITY TULSA SERIES#
This is part of a grand farewell prayer, part of a series of Jesus’ last requests to God his Father before going to the Cross. On one level, this is not a “moral teaching of Jesus.” Jesus is offering no moral imperatives here.
“We are privileged to listen in on what God the Son is saying to God the Father before going to die.” This unity and the love that makes it possible demonstrate God’s glory and aid in the spread of belief in Jesus in the world. It is part of the “glory” of Christ, and Christ has passed it forward to his followers as a sublime expression of his love for them. That relationship is understood as ineffably united, noncompetitive, mutually serving and loving.
That unity is possible due to the nature of God the Father’s relationship with God the Son, a mystery (perhaps the universe’s very highest mystery) in which those whom the Son has gathered in community participate. The Jesus we see in John is praying to his Father for the unity of believers. But, as New Testament scholar Marianne Meye Thompson writes, “the mission of the disciples only expresses their unity it does not create that unity,” which “exists, not because of human effort, but because of God’s life-giving love for the world that is expressed through and in the mission of Jesus.” The purpose of Christian unity is described twice as evangelistic - “so that the world may believe that you have sent me” and “so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Jesus says he has passed this glory on to the disciples, for the purpose that “they may be one, as we are one.”
Verse 22 expands the basis of Christian unity as relating to the “glory” - revelation of God’s splendor and power - that God has given Jesus. This is available to the church through participating in the unity of the Godhead (reading verse 21 as “may they also be one in us”).
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