Did the Lord’s prayer in John 17: 21 (“that they also may be one”) fail?

How could it? We know that if we ask God “anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions which we have asked of him” (1 John 5: 14, 15). Now the Lord Jesus said of His Father that “I knew that thou always hearest me” (John 11: 42) and that “I am come down from heaven, not that I should do my will, but the will of him that has sent me” (John 6: 38). It was impossible for Him to ask anything in prayer that was not according to the will of His father, and it was therefore impossible for His prayers to fail.

   The reason many think that this petition of the Lord must have failed is that they look around at the disunity in the professing church and assume that what is ecclesiastical is in view in the prayer. Let us set the prayer in its context. In verse 11, the Lord prays to His Father concerning the eleven disciples, “that they may be one as we”. This prayer was answered: those who had specially companied with the Lord as His apostles were preserved in unity in His subsequent absence. The standard is “as we”—the Father and the Son—and it means that their oneness was to be similarly complete.

   In verse 20, the Lord widens out His petition: “I do not demand for these only” (the apostles) “but also for those who believe on me through their word”. This brings in you and me, for, unlike the disciples, we have not seen the Lord, but we have believed their word concerning Him that is recorded for us in the New Testament. For Christians generally then, the Lord demands something—the word demand (erwtaw) implying that the petitioner is on a footing of equality or familiarity with the one asked, and therefore unlikely to be refused. What the Lord asks is “that they may be all one, as thou, Father, [art] in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us” (v21). Note the change in language: with the apostles it was “that they may be one as we” (v11) but here it is “that they may be all one, as thou, Father, [art] in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us” (v21, my emphasis). This kind of language has appeared before (see John 10: 38; 14: 10, 11, 20), and the Son being in the Father, and the Father in the Son, is a divine unity such that it is impossible to think of the Son without the Father, or the Father without the Son. As the Lord said, “I and the Father are one” (John 10: 30). This divine unity forms the basis of the unity the Lord demands for Christians, for it is “that they may be all one, as thou, Father, [art] in me, and I in thee” (John 17: 21, my emphasis). However, the Lord does not stop there, but goes on to say, “that they also may be one in us” (v21). Why in us? Because it is in the divine unity between the Father and the Son that the unity demanded for us is found. Thus all true believers share, love and value this divine unity—the Father manifesting Himself in the Son, and the Son revealing the Father. It is something that binds Christians together, even though, ecclesiastically, they may be apart—a oneness in the joy of divine grace. The effect of this is “that the world may believe that thou hast sent me” (v21)—the unity between believers in relation to the Father and the Son has an effect in testimony to the world. In John’s writings, there are really only two companies—the world, and those “not of the world” (v14). The testimony to the world by those not of it is a united one that “the Father has sent the Son [as] Saviour of the world” (1 John 4: 14). Could you accredit a man as a believer who was not unified with other believers in that testimony? No. Furthermore, if you saw a man in the street being abused for preaching the Son being sent as Saviour, then you are duty bound to stand with him—even if ecclesiastically unconnected. Why? Because the divine unity being considered here demands that you do. You either stand with him, or (in walking by) with the world.   

   The Lord’s prayer concerning His own has not failed, and nor has it (as some say) only been ‘partially’ fulfilled. The unity spoken of in John 17: 21 has never been broken, and never will be broken. Soon, verses 22-23 will also be fulfilled: “And the glory which thou hast given me I have given them, that they may be one, as we are one; I in them and thou in me, that they may be perfected into one [and] that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and [that] thou hast loved them as thou hast loved me”. This is a future unity. In v21, it is “that the world may believe” but here it is “that the world may know” (my emphasis). This is no longer the day of testimony but the day of display, when all shall see from the fact that we share Christ’s glory that we have been loved as He is loved. This future unity also cannot fail, but it is not based on “as thou, Father, [art] in me, and I in thee” (v21) but on “I in them and thou in me” (v23). This is fitting for the day of display, when the Lord “shall have come to be glorified in his saints” (2 Thess. 1: 10), coming “in his glory, and [in that] of the Father …” (Luke 9: 26).