And now I am coming to thee; but while I am still in the world I speak these words, so that they may have my joy within them in full measure. I have delivered thy word to them, and the world hates them because they are strangers in the world, as I am. I pray thee, not to take them out of the world, but to keep them from the evil one. They are strangers in the world, as I am. Consecrate them by the truth; thy word is truth. As thou hast sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world, and for their sake I now consecrate myself, that they too may be consecrated by the truth.
But it is not for these alone that I pray, but for those also who through their words put their faith in me; may they all be one: as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, so also may they be in us, that the world may believe that thou didst send me. The glory which thou gavest me I have given to them, that they may be one, as we are one; I in them and thou in me, may they be perfectly one. Then the world will learn that thou didst send me, that thou didst love them as thou didst me (John 17:13-23).
Jesus here prays for his disciples and for all those who would come after them. He knows that they will be in conflict with the world. He knows this because his own life, his words, his kingdom were in such conflict with the world, and now his life is in them, his words have been received by them, and the message of his kingdom has been entrusted to them.
The world will hate them just as it hated him. The world will treat them as they have treated him because they, like him, will not be of the world, will not belong to the world, but will live as strangers in it, just as he did.
And yet, for all the expectation of conflict in Jesus' prayer of intercession, it is not a prayer of despair, bitterness, or pessimism. Rather it is a prayer of deepest love, filled with hope and joy. Jesus yearns for his disciples to know and be sustained by the same love that binds him together with his Father. The very love and glory which he has received from God he now wants to share with his disciples and his desire is "that they may have my joy within them in full measure."
He prays that they may be drawn into that same relationship of love and unity that he shares with God: "... may they all be one: as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, so also may they be in us, that the world may believe that thou didst send me .... I in them and thou in me, may they be perfectly one."
That call to community, to be drawn into the very heart of God's love together in Christ, is the source and the foundation of all Christian hope and joy.
It is of great significance that this most powerful affirmation of Christian hope and joy comes in the context of a prayer that makes one of the strongest statements in the New Testament about the essential conflict of the gospel with the world.
The meaning of Jesus' prayer is utterly clear. Those who would follow Jesus will find themselves in radical discontinuity with the world. Because they belong to Christ, they do not belong to the world, but live in conflict with it. The disciples' true hope is in Christ, and that hope puts them in conflict with the world.
Not being of the world, Jesus' disciples are in the world as he was, to confront it with the love and truth it does not want to know.
The offense of the gospel lies in its discontinuity with the world. That is also the hope of the gospel. It has always been so. The hope is in our continuity with Christ and, therefore, our discontinuity with the world.
The power of the Christian life is joy and hope in the face of discontinuity. The churches have never accepted this easily. Endless theologies have been constructed to ease the discontinuity, to reduce the conflict, to find some accommodation between Christ and the world, to affirm the world on its own terms, to find our hope in the world after all and to secure a more comfortable place in it.
The placing of false hope in the world and its power to save itself has always been and continues to be the great threat to the church.
What the church must always seek is the gracefulness of a life lived in discontinuity. It is the gracefulness of living an ordinary and normal life in Christ, which is so extraordinary and abnormal in the world. Partaking of the richness of that life, one which the world regards as a scandal, is the source of our joy.
Our desire as a publication is not only to expose the conflicts between the gospel and the world which must be made clear in our day, but also to speak of the joy of belonging to Christ and, through him, to one another. Our vocation is not simply to be a barb, a prophetic pricking of conscience, but also to be a nurturer of a whole way of life that demonstrates the meaning of being in Christ in the world. That is where our true hope lies.
Those who affirm most strongly the discontinuity of the gospel with the world--those who are most in opposition to the world as it is--are often accused of being too negative, too critical, too pessimistic, and without hope. Such criticism has, at times, been expressed toward us at Sojourners.
However, the lesson of Jesus' prayer is that to be in solidarity with Christ is to be in conflict with the world. To identify with Christ means refusing to accept the world as it is and always seeking the most fundamental change in the world until the end of time. It is to take a perpetually revolutionary stance.
Our hope at Sojourners is in the raising up of the kind of church that accepts the life of discontinuity and joy that comes in belonging to Christ.
The context and content of Jesus' prayer says clearly that accepting a life in conflict with the world is not withdrawal from the world. On the contrary. The conflict of Jesus' life was that he lived God's love and truth in the open and confronted the world with its power. The world was provoked, and he was crucified.
To live out the life of Christ in the world is to defy the world's false hopes while affirming the world's only true hope. It is true, as some have charged, that Sojourners has no ultimate hope in America. Neither is our hope and commitment vested simply in other ideological alternatives. That such a stance seems scandalous is merely another indication of the church's misplaced trust in our nation, the economy, and in the systems of the world.
Those Christians who have experienced the conflict between the gospel and the world most personally and painfully have always known the joy of Christ most fully. The deeper the conflict, the stronger the identification with Christ, the greater the joy.
To avoid the conflict, to ease the tension, to evade dissent is in fact to deny the meaning of Christ in the world and to lose the only hope that is worth having.
In Jesus' prayer, the nurturing of the love the disciples share together becomes the key to their position of discontinuity with the world. The richness and the power of their love for one another makes their uncommon existence in the world not merely tolerable, but renewing and life-giving.
On the eve of his crucifixion, in which his own conflict with the world would reach its climax, Jesus' principal concern is with the quality of life shared by his disciples. That same concern must be our own, especially when our conflict with the world is most pronounced.
It is the vitality of our love for one another that makes the radical Christian life not something to be endured, but celebrated. It is the hope and joy of that celebration that makes our resistance possible and saves it from cynicism, bitterness, and hatred that would otherwise be the consequence of a life lived in opposition to the world as it is. Such a life is not only the Christian's only hope--it is also the world's only hope.
Jim Wallis was editor-in-chief of Sojourners when this article appeared .
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