John 17 contains Jesus’ final prayer
for his disciples — meaning he was praying both for the little band that
followed him around Palestine in the days of his flesh and for the rest of us who
have embraced him as Lord since then. The prayer contains a remarkable and
seemingly overgenerous assertion about his followers. Jesus says, “They do not
belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.” Or as the biblical
paraphrase The Message words it, “They
are no more defined by the world than I am defined by the world.”
In John, the “world” is his
shorthand for the sphere that is in opposition to the things of God. Looking at
those original disciples at that point — just hours before Jesus’ arrest and
crucifixion — it’s hard for us to give them as much credit as Jesus does, for
they appear quite entangled with the world’s values, the very same world that
Jesus said does not define them. At best, the disciples had no more than a
glimmer of the life to which Jesus had called them. Leading up to the Last
Supper where Jesus prayed this prayer, a couple of them had asked for places of
prominence in Christ’s kingdom and the others had grumbled about it, for they,
too, in the mindset of the world around them, wanted rewards for their service.
And within hours following this prayer, one of the disciples would deny him and
most would desert him.
Given all that, it seems more
generous than true for Jesus to declare to the Father, “They do not belong to
the world, just as I do not belong to the world.”
But we said that Jesus was also
praying for us, and we know our own failures and how entangled with ungodly
things we sometimes get — how much we do still appear to belong to the world.
So Jesus’ statement seems overly generous when referring to us as well.
 
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