Until now[…]I have spoken to you in figures…
In the name of the Father…
Today’s gospel is taken from what has come to be known as the great “High Priestly Prayer” of Jesus at the end of Chapter 17 of St John’s gospel. It comes at the very end of the so-called “Farewell Discourses” of Jesus and directly before St John’s narrative of the Passion. It comes, in other words, at a critical juncture in the gospel, and in many ways the high priestly prayer of Jesus represents the rhetorical, if not the dramatic, climax of the whole of the gospel of John. And yet, if the high priestly prayer is the moment when the spoken word of Jesus reaches a kind of zenith, it has to be said that it also exemplifies all that we find most confounding, dare I say exasperating, about the way Jesus speaks in St John’s Gospel, that peculiar quality of the Johannine Jesus’s speech that makes it such a struggle for us to grasp what he is talking about.
Consider, for example, this from the text we have just heard: “I have given them the glory you have given to me, that they may be one as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be perfected in unity so that the world may know that it was you who sent me and that you have loved them just as you have loved me.” Now it doesn’t take a genius to see what makes a sentence like this such a handful for us. It is simply that, like so many of the sayings of Jesus in St John, it point blank refuses all conventions of politeness as to when it ought to stop. “I have given them glory…that they may be one…that they may be perfected…so that the world…and that you…just as you” and so on and so on. The effect on the reader, earnestly trying to following the train of the Lord’s thought, is like nothing so much as trying vainly to remain on our feet whilst being repeatedly slugged in the head by a heavyweight boxer.
It would be one thing, of course, if this kind of rhetorical construction was confined to the high priestly prayer of Jesus, but, as any conscientious reader of St John’s gospel will know, this is just how the Johannine Jesus speaks. It’s as if the Lord cannot open his mouth without setting off a great humming cloud of echoes, of reverberation, in which all the definition of what he originally set out to say is lost to us, and we flounder and eventually give up altogether.
And yet, if the speech of Jesus in St John’s gospel has a tendency to leave us somewhat at sea, it does nonetheless contain a constant from which we can reliably take our bearings, a kind of true north to which the speech of the Jesus returns again and again, and that is to the one Jesus calls his Father. Start reading at random from any part of the text of St John’s gospel and you will immediately discover what I am talking about. “Very truly I tell you” says Jesus “the Son can do nothing on his own but only what he sees the Father doing, for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise.”; “Just as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself”; “The works that the Father has given me to complete[…]testify on my behalf that the Father has sent me” and so on and so on. In other words, if the speech of the Johannine Jesus is indeed attended by a kind of echo, then the great sounding board from which these echoes return is the one Jesus calls his Father.
And it is precisely here that the high priestly prayer of Jesus, as a kind of exemplar of the speech habits of the Johannine Jesus, has the potential to unlock for us the mystery of the way Jesus speaks in the gospel of John. Because the one thing we can say for sure about the high priestly prayer of Jesus is that it is a prayer. And what we know about the prayer of Jesus is that whenever Jesus prays what we are listening to is not merely a creature addressing his Creator, but a revelation of the inner dynamics of the eternal Trinity, we are listening to the call of God to God within the Godhead. And if that is what we are listening to in the high priestly prayer of Jesus — and indeed in all the speech of Jesus in St John’s gospel — then all of a sudden we begin to see why we might be having trouble making sense of what we are hearing, why the speech of Jesus might sound to us like a kind of restless echoing across the distance between him and his Father, because what we are listening to in the speech of the Johannine Jesus, in so far as human language is able to convey it, is nothing less than the dynamic activity of the Holy Trinity.
But — if this rather audacious theory has any truth to it, there are at least two questions it raises. The first is that, if the distinctive way Jesus has of speaking in the gospel of John is indeed in some sense an echo of the dynamic activity of the Trinity, then do we really gain anything from this insight, is what Jesus has to say in the gospel of John any more intelligible to us as a result? And the second question is the great one that has dogged every discussion of the Trinity from time immemorial: what about the Holy Spirit?
Both of these questions can, I think, be answered with reference to a little throwaway remark of Jesus in the farewell discourses immediately before he begins his high priestly prayer, the quotation I began with today. It’s a very small saying, easy overlooked, and yet it is a crucial one for our purposes, not least because in it Jesus all but confesses to the kind of rhetorical shenanigans I have been accusing him of this morning. “Until now” he says to his disciples “I have spoken to you in figures of speech. [But] the hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures but will speak to you plainly of the Father”. In other words, not only does Jesus admit to his disciples that his speech to them, up to this point, has not been quite what it seems, that it has been a kind of figuring of something much larger and more profound than human speech can convey, but he also promises them that a time is coming when he will not speak to them in this way any more, that he will speak to them directly, in a way they can readily understand.
Now, as I say, Jesus says this to his disciples immediately before he begins his high priestly prayer. And so there is, understandably, an almost palpable sense of disappointment when he goes on to speak in that prayer in precisely the same manner he has spoken to them throughout the whole of John’s gospel. “I have given them the glory…so that they…so that the world” and so forth. And yet, to suppose that the high priestly prayer of Jesus is the moment Jesus is referring to when he says that “the hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures” is simply to misunderstand his meaning. It is not this moment he is referring to but the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost. “When the Spirit of truth comes” Jesus has told the disciples just a few verses earlier “he will guide you into all the truth[…]he will take what is mine and reveal it to you”. In other words, it is the Spirit who will reveal to the disciples what it is Jesus has been saying to them throughout the gospel of John. It is the Holy Spirit who will break open the mystery of the Johannine Jesus’s words.
And if that is true then we can say something further about the manner in which we come to understand all that Jesus has been saying in the gospel of John. For the work of the Spirit is not to sit us down like a schoolmaster and explain to us what Jesus really meant to say, but rather to draw us into the very dynamic of divine life that Jesus’s speech is all the time gesturing us towards, into the very life of the Trinity. It is not, in other words, by any kind of scholarly exposition, but by being drawn by the Spirit into the very life of the Trinity itself that we will come at last to understand what Jesus is talking about when he speaks of giving us the glory his Father has given to him, of our being “one” as he and his Father are one, of our being in him as he is in his Father.
And so then, if for no other reason than that we may at last begin to understand what Jesus is talking about in the gospel of St John, let us say with the disciples and all the saints: Come Holy Spirit and fill the hearts of your faithful people. Amen