John 17:1-11

This passage is part of the prayer that Jesus prays for the disciples at the end of the Farewell Discourse. The Farewell Discourse is John’s recollection of Jesus’ final instructions just before he’s arrested. His instructions to his disciples begin with the foot washing in chapter 13 and continue through chapter 16; all of chapter 17 is his closing prayer before he leaves for the garden, where he’s immediately arrested (John 18:1-12). In these verses, Jesus is still sitting at the table with his disciples. He knows what lies ahead and he knows that this is his last opportunity to teach them what is most important.

In a nutshell, his prayer says, “I’ve taught them everything I know, God, everything that you showed me. Now these disciples who have been mine are yours. They have been one with me; now they are one with you.” The verses are filled with the plea that God “glorify” Jesus. As David Lose writes, it’s “a lot of glory talk,” especially for contemporary ears. We tend to identify glory with strength, victory, triumph, success, and adulation. About the only place I run into the word “glory” apart from vague, churchy hymns is in the context of war or sporting events. Jesus, however, seeks glory in servanthood, suffering, vulnerability, and loss. Somehow, God is glorified in these things in Jesus. Does that mean Christ’s followers should seek out suffering and loss? Definitely not, and the danger is that these verses could be interpreted as promoting or recommending if not exalting suffering. That isn’t the point. But perhaps it should tell us that God isn’t glorified in what we normally define as success, particularly where that success comes at the expense of justice and shalom for God’s creation.

Then Jesus refers to “eternal life.” He says, “…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.”

This is eternal life: that they may know the one true God and Jesus Christ.

Hmmmm. Nothing about heaven or any kind of afterlife; not even any reference to time. This is very different from contemporary ideas about what “eternal life” means. Here, eternal life is “knowing;” knowing God and Christ, which implies an interactive, two-way relationship.

Commentator Cody Sanders quotes Mary Coloe: “As Son, [Jesus] reveals God’s love for the world and God’s desire to draw all into God’s own eternity life, which is to participate in the very being of God” (emphasis added). Coloe uses the phrase “eternity life” to emphasize a different quality of life, rather than simply the elongation of it. Sanders also quotes David Ford: “I have read the whole Gospel as an invitation to enter into a relationship of trusting Jesus, with continuing ‘life in his name’ involving an ongoing drama of desiring, learning, praying, and loving in community, for the sake of God’s love for the world.”

This connects with the glory talk in this way: As Brian D. McLaren writes, “In Christ, we see an image of God who is armed not with lightning bolts but with basin and towel…” (see John 13:1-10). McLaren continues, “In Christ, God is supreme, but not in the old, discredited paradigm of supremacy: God is the supreme healer, the supreme friend, the supreme lover, the supreme life-giver who self-empties in gracious love for all.” Catherine LaCugna puts it this way: “The very nature of God … is to seek out the deepest possible communion and friendship with every last creature on this earth.”

If we worship and follow that God, the God that Jesus tried to show us – not dominating, nonviolent, supreme in service, and self-giving – then we will be living “eternity life,” a different quality of life, now. Not in the future after we die, but now.

As Diana Butler Bass puts it, Christianity has long been an “elevator religion” focused on getting people up, up, and away from this troubled earth to heaven. By keeping us focused on heaven and life after death, elevator Christianity has kept us from noticing or taking seriously what’s happening around us: growing economic inequality, the climate catastrophe, expanding militarization and weaponization, and scapegoating people on the margins. What Jesus points us toward here, and what we so desperately need, is to switch from elevator Christianity, a religion organized for self-preservation, privilege, and the hereafter to a religion that knows and participates in the very being of our loving God, that seeks out the deepest possible communion with every creature, a religion organizing for the common good of this world that God so loves (John 3:16).

In other words, a religion that’s a movement. A movement for “eternity life,” or as McLaren translates it, “life of the ages,” or “life to the full.”

© Joanne Whitt 2026 all rights reserved.

Resources:
Cody J. Sanders, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/seventh-sunday-of-easter/commentary-on-john-171-11-7
Mary L. Coloe, John 1–10, Wisdom Commentary (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2021).
David F. Ford, The Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021).
Brian D. McLaren, The Great Spiritual Migration: How the World’s Largest Religion Is Seeking a Better Way to Be Christian (New York: Convergent Books, 2016).
McLaren, Faith After Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do About It (New York: St. Martin’s Essentials, 2021).
McLaren, Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crisis, and a Revolution of Hope (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2007).
https://brianmclaren.net/if-youve-never-discovered/