I READ the Gospel in English (NRSV), then in Greek, then in Greek again. My second look at the Greek was not reflective, in the spirit of lectio divina, that slow-burn style of spiritual reading. Something had attracted my curiosity. Conspicuous in the Greek (but not the English) was a small word: hina. It often indicates purpose — “in order that”, “so that”, or simply “that”. John 17.20-26 contains this word hina nine times. Could these nine uses of “so that”/hina all be expressing purpose?
Hina has many shades of meaning, and purpose is only one of them. Whatever language we read the Bible in, the same principle directs our reading: if in doubt, go back to the text. Read it again. Carefully. Now it is evident: seven of the nine examples of hina in this passage express some kind of purpose. Now we say for certain that, at this moment in his ministry, Jesus is driven by a sense of purpose.
Or perhaps “purposes”, plural; for Jesus expresses several. In verses 20-21, a single sentence contains hina three times, and in it each successive element in God’s divine plan depends on the one before: Jesus asks that they may be one (first purpose), so that they may be “in us” (Jesus and the Father: second purpose), so that the world may believe (third purpose).
Much of John 14-17 can be complex and slippery, making it difficult for us to find our way to the message. But repeated reading, with close attention to detail, brings that message into focus. After all, not everything worth finding (in scripture or in other aspects of life) lies on the surface. What comes first, Jesus says, is the unity of believers. That will lead to — second — incorporation into God (“in us”). Third, it will enable them to have an effect on the world.
This last purpose is one that we are looking forward to; for the shift from Easter into Pentecost is just around the corner. The means of communicating God’s purpose in Christ is about to be lavished on the apostles, and then on all believers. As in this Gospel, so in the Church’s seasons: there is a clear direction of movement, from God, through Christ, to the world.
To drive home the importance of this sequence of purposes, Jesus returns twice more to the matter of unity. In verse 22, he has bestowed God’s glory on the disciples, “so that they may be one”. In verse 23, he amplifies the message, making it more emphatic, “that they may become completely one”. If this reading of the sequence of purposes in the Gospel is right, then everything about the Christian mission to the world depends on Christian believers’ becoming completely one.
But we are not. We have never been “completely one”, not even in the days of the apostles themselves. From the beginning, Christians disagreed about the meaning of circumcision, about meat offered to “idols”, and about practices such as holding goods in common.
It is easy to sidestep the problem by saying that Christian unity is like Christian righteousness: a self-evident good to be striven for, because in the striving is the mark of our true discipleship; but that unity is not a goal to be accomplished on this side of eternity.
If, however, the sequence of purposes in John reflects Jesus’s understanding of his mission to the world (as it surely must), then unity must come first. It is the foundation on which everything else is to be built — not an aim, or end result, or a prize to be striven for (like Paul’s “pressing on toward the goal”, Philippians 3.14).
One does not need to be an expert analyst to know that unity between Christian Churches is fractured, by ethical and cultural differences, even by doctrine. We may not fight one another nowadays about the relationship of the persons in the Godhead, but disputation over authority (scripture, tradition, episcopacy) and morality (divorce, homosexuality, feminism) is flourishing.
This leaves two possible conclusions: either God’s holy purposes in Christ have failed, and will go on failing (because Christians are not “one” as God and his Word are “one”); or being “one” does not mean what we think it does. “Unity” is one thing, a self-evident good. “Unification”— the Churches’ efforts to make all Christians think and behave alike — is something else, not self-evidently good, perhaps not even good at all.
