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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