We Are One in Christ---Sermon for Easter 7 C (John 17)
I’m grateful to have this opportunity to preach at Fort Street Presbyterian Church. I’ve been doing a lot of preaching in Presbyterian churches during my retirement, but I’m an ordained Disciples of Christ minister. Standing at the center of the Disciples of Christ identity is the pursuit of Christian unity. One of our founders called this our polar star. I fully embrace this calling in my own life and ministry, which is why I’m here this morning. Therefore, this reading from John 17 means a lot to me as an ecumenically inclined preacher. The way I see things, whether we’re Presbyterian or Disciples of Christ, Roman Catholic or Greek Orthodox, we are all one in Christ.
Our reading from John 17 concludes Jesus’ “High Priestly Prayer.” After Jesus finished praying, he headed to the Garden of Gethsemane, where he was betrayed by Judas and arrested by the Temple guards. He began his prayer by looking up to heaven and saying: “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you” (Jn. 17:1). One of the ways the Son is glorified is through the unity of his followers because it is through this unity that the world will know that the Father sent the Son into the world.
The words in and one stand out in this prayer. These words remind us that our oneness is rooted in Jesus’ relationship with the Father, which then extends outward to include everyone who believes in Jesus. When we speak of belief, we should think in terms of putting our trust in Jesus rather than simply giving intellectual assent to a set of doctrines.
When we pick up the prayer in verse 20, Jesus has already asked God to glorify him. Now he asks that the disciples would share in the unity he shared with the Father. In making this request, Jesus focused not just on his current followers but also on the ones who would come to believe that the Father sent Jesus into the world through the witness of his disciples. Then, these future disciples can participate in the oneness that exists between Jesus and the Father. This witness on the part of his disciples is enhanced by their oneness as a community.
Jesus’ prayer provides the spiritual foundation of the modern Ecumenical Movement. While Christian unity is an important, even essential, element of our Christian witness, it’s not an end in itself. Our unity as members of the Body of Christ is a means to the reconciliation of all things in God. When that happens, the world itself will share in the oneness that exists between Jesus and the Father. We may not have experienced this unity in its fullness, but it’s something we can embrace because it is an expression of God’s love for the world (Jn. 3:16).
While God desires that we should be one in Christ, not all forms of unity are the same. My friend, Jose Morales, a professor at Chicago Theological Seminary, pointed out in a sermon based on John 17 that unity for the sake of unity can be dangerous. He suggested that “unity is hard” and inconvenient because unity isn’t a good thing when it allows injustice to continue. This form of unity is an idol that keeps us from recognizing the kind of unity Jesus envisioned as he prepared to go to the cross. So, as Jose puts it, “safe unity is no unity at all.”
With this caution in mind, we can hear Jesus’ prayer for the unity of his followers, through which the love of God for the world is revealed. He prayed that his disciples would enjoy the same unity he enjoyed with the Father so that God’s love might be in us as well. Jesus prayed:
“O righteous Father, the world doesn’t know you, but I do; and these disciples know you sent me. I have revealed you to them, and I will continue to do so. Then your love for me will be in them, and I will be in them.” (Jn. 17:25-26 NLT).
The love of God poured out on the disciples through Jesus is revealed to the rest of the cosmos through the witness of Jesus’ followers. When this happens, we can participate in the oneness that is God.
Now John’s gospel can get a bit mystical and even cosmic. His gospel isn’t as earthy as Mark’s, which is why we have more than one Gospel to get the full story of Jesus. This prayer has a cosmic and mystical sense to it as it speaks of glory and oneness with God. This vision of Jesus’ glory is rooted in John’s prologue, where we read: “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God” (Jn. 1:1-2) This Word, is the light that shines in the darkness (Jn. 1:5). John the Baptist bore witness to the light, “so that all might believe through him” (Jn. 1:7). Finally, the “Word became flesh and lived among us and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:14).
In John’s Gospel, Jesus is the revelation of God’s presence on earth. If you want to see God, then look to Jesus. In the Gospel of John, we encounter signs rather than miracles. These signs, whether turning water into wine or making a blind man see, reveal something about Jesus’ identity as the Word of God made flesh.
John’s vision of the Cosmic Christ suggests that Jesus transcends this world, because “all things came into being through him, and without him nothing came into being” (Jn. 1:3). Therefore, everything that exists finds its meaning, purpose, and redemption in Jesus, who draws us into his own life so we can share in the life of God. This is what it means to experience eternal life or put on immortality.
The message here in John 17 is that the foundation of our oneness as the body of Christ is found in the oneness Jesus shared with the Father. This unity is not something we create through doctrines or institutions. It’s something that comes to us from God through Jesus. For as Jesus declares: “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”
This cosmic fellowship extends outward from the eternal relationship of Father and Son and Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit may not appear in this prayer, but Jesus had already told the disciples that God would send the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, to be with the believers, so they might bear witness to the glory of God seen in the glory of Jesus. Ultimately, this prayer extends out to include us and everyone who believes. You might envision this as a set of concentric circles moving outward to embrace all of creation, so that in the words of Paul “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us” (2 Cor. 5:19). This is the foundation and purpose of Christian unity. As New Testament scholar Marianne Meye-Thompson puts it, “Their unity is organic, not because of human effort but because of God’s life-giving love for the world that is expressed through and in the mission of Jesus” [John: A Commentary, Kindle p. 356].
John invites us to share in the unity Jesus prayed for. It is a unity that, as Jose Morales reminds us, “is grounded in, and emerges from, service and sacrifice. Between washing feet and taking up a cross.” This kind of unity is not safe or easy. In fact, “it is dangerous and radical” [Preaching as Resistance, p. 45].
The good news Jesus offers us this morning in his “High Priestly Prayer” is that we would be drawn into the divine fellowship that transforms the cosmos. As followers of Jesus, we have been commissioned to bear witness to the unity that exists between the Father and the Son through our union with one another and with God, so the world might know and experience God’s love for the world, which was revealed in Jesus.
Although the author of the Gospel of John did not write the Book of Revelation, this word from Revelation 7 offers us a vision of what our unity in Christ looks like:
After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne and to the Lamb!” (Rev. 7:9-10).
Michael Gorman offers this interpretation of the message of this passage, which I believe fits with the message of John 17: “This perpetual multinational liturgy embodies the universal salvation brought in Christ: the reconciliation of the peoples of the earth to one another and to their creator and redeemer.” [Gorman, Reading Revelation Responsibly, (Kindle p. 224).] May we embrace our oneness with God and one another in Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit so that the world might know God’s love!
Preached by:
Dr. Robert D. Cornwall
Pulpit Supply
Fort Street Presbyterian Church (PCUSA)
Detroit, MI
Easter 7C
June 1, 2025
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