Glory and Giving
This is Eternal Life
Jesus looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.
“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. Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; for 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. I 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. All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. And 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.” [1]
This passage comes from the “high priestly prayer,” the prayer with which Jesus concludes his final message to his disciples in John’s Gospel. This prayer is about “glory” and about “giving.” The verbal and noun forms of the word “glory” appear six times in the first eleven verses of the prayer, and the verb “to give” appears eleven times. Clearly, we need to pay attention to these words if we hope to understand this enigmatic, mystical text.
The great Johannine scholar, Raymond Brown, observed that “glory” has two aspects: it is a visible manifestation of majesty through acts of power.[2] From the first chapter of John, we are told that Jesus reveals the glory of God. It is demonstrated in seven acts of power or visible signs that Jesus performs: turning water in into wine in Cana, healing the royal official’s son in Capernaum, healing the paralytic in Bethesda, feeding the 5,000, walking on water, healing the man born blind from birth, and raising Lazarus from the dead.[3]
These seven signs parallel the seven days of creation, indicating that the Word or Wisdom of God through whom all things were made is incarnate in Jesus, revealing God’s glory.[4] With the final, eighth sign, Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension into heaven, a new creation is inaugurated. This is the work that Jesus completed in his earthly ministry for the glory of God: the work of renewing creation.
God and Jesus share the same glory, the work for which Jesus is sent by God. The act of power that makes visible the unity of the Father and Son, in Johannine terms, is the giving of eternal life to believers. What is eternal life? In a striking statement, the Johannine writer says, “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”[5] Eternal life is not going to heaven when you die. It is not a quantitative experience of time as endless repetition. It is a qualitative experience of life through intimate, immediate experience of God and Jesus.
John’s Gospel speaks of this intimate experience as an inter-abiding of God in Jesus, Jesus in us, and us in God. It is a knowledge communicated through love. Such knowledge isn’t just intellectual. It is embodied. It is lived. Jesus also describes this knowledge as the giving of God’s name. “Name” here indicates a sense of identity. Jesus reveals God’s identity, the identity that God gave to Jesus, through the pattern of his life that he invites us to share with him. Jesus is the real vine, shepherd, bread, living water, way, truth, and life – the model for us to emulate. It is by living and loving like Jesus that we come to know God and experience eternal life – here and now, not just then and there.
Jesus’ work is to bring us into intimate union with God so that we might realize the abundant life that God intends for human beings and for the fulfillment of the whole creation. This “new creation” is the fulfillment of the promise inherent in creation from the beginning, an emergent evolutionary potential for the development of human consciousness. Through loving communion with God and creation, we manifest Christ consciousness in our lives and share in Christ’s work of world renewal.
I want to underscore the relationship between knowing God, the intimate, interior, contemplative experience of unitive consciousness, and the outward, visible, concrete experience of eternal life, abundant life. They are flip sides of the same coin, much like love of God and love of neighbor. The inner and outer worlds cannot be separated. Action in one dimension of reality has effects in all the other dimensions. Knowing God, loving God, is a sharing in the glory of God: in visible manifestation of majesty through acts of power. The gift of eternal life, of knowing God and Jesus, is generative. It makes stuff happen; good stuff for the flourishing of life in the world.
The gift of eternal life is not flight from the world. It does bring us into conflict with the world; that is, the worldviews and life-ways based on greed, violence, domination and exploitation. In this sense, we may be in the world but not of it, but precisely for the sake of the salvation of the world. In fact, Jesus us sends us into the world just as God sent him into the world. The gift of eternal life brings us into deeper communion with all things in love.
We find ourselves, at this moment in the liturgical year, poised between the mystery of the Ascension and the mystery of Pentecost. Jesus, the incarnation of Holy Wisdom, has completed his work and has returned to the Father. He has been “raised up” into the life of God, which is to say that he is no longer just back then and there in Jerusalem, but is now present at the heart of all reality. This new way of being present with us is experienced through the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus doesn’t just finish his work, call it a day, and slip off to heaven. He continues to be present with us, revealing God’s glory through the visible acts of power we enact in his name, conforming to the pattern of his life: healing, feeding, forgiving, truth-telling, empowering, giving ourselves away for the sake of life and love.
Jesus concludes his prayer with these words, a prayer for us:
“Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me. I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”[6]
God’s glory is always revealed through the power of love in the service of life. May we come to know God and Jesus, whom he has sent, and become ever more deeply identified with their work of loving service, of glory and giving. This is eternal life.
[1] John 17:1-11.
[2] Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John XIII – XXI (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1970), p. 751.
[3] John 2:1-11; 4:46-54; 5:1-15; 6:5-14; 6:16-24; 9:1-7; 11:1-45.
[4] John 1:1-14.
[5] John 17:3.
[6] John 17:25-26.