“Those who do not belong to the world but are sent into the world.”

This is one of the most serious sayings Jesus ever spoke. Does it get any more beautiful or soulful than this?  Today’s text, John 17, is where Jesus, before concluding his earthly ministry and facing the cross, shares a last supper with his disciples. And Judas, who betrayed Jesus, was there.  After the supper, he went to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray. So between the Passover supper and his arrest, Jesus’ prayer contains today’s text.

What Jesus is praying for now stems from the fact that he is about to depart. He is entrusting his disciples to the Father he has known and loved during his earthly life, the Father who will take care of them as he did. Jesus is well aware that his disciples are in danger. The world, which hates his disciples just as the world has hated him, will threaten and persecute, as seen with the early Christians facing opposition from both the Jewish authorities and the Roman Empire.

I’m praying for them.

Jesus, like a parent about to send their children into a dangerous battlefield, earnestly prays to God for the protection of his beloved disciples, who will remain in the world. He first confirms and explains to God who the disciples are: they are the ones given to Jesus by the Father; they belong to him, and they, too, truly understand that Jesus came from God and believe that God sent him. And though Jesus will no longer be in the world, he prays for their oneness with one another just as he and the Father are one.

‘They don’t belong to the world.’

Then Jesus prays for his disciples, ‘They don’t belong to the world.’ They live in this world, but they are not of this world, and they are to be sent out into the world? What a difficult puzzle! What does it mean? The disciples were born into the world; they grew up in that world and lived their lives in it. Just like us.

It’s crucial to note that ‘the world’ is not just the physical universe as we know it.  It’s not about a good/evil dichotomy where the church is good, and the world is evil, nor does it imply that the spirit is important while everything done in the physical domain is not. Such thinking contradicts God’s creative power. If God created the world and it was good to look at, and John 3:16 says, ‘God so loved the world’, how can we label it as evil?

Insofar as the disciples are people who have been distinguished from ‘the world’ – people who have been made new and cleansed by Jesus’ call, by all that he has done, by all his power, by his wisdom, by his teaching – they are not “of the world”. They are strangers in the world; they are people who have been transformed by God’s way of life. The distinction is that they are in the world, but their faith-allegiance is to God. So, our identity as followers of Christ is to live in tension with the boundary between being ‘out of the world’ and ‘in the world’.

Let me share a story with you: two young fish are swimming along. Then they happen to meet an old fish swimming in the opposite direction. The old fish nods at them and says, ‘Hey, good morning boys, how’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a while, and then one looks over at the other and says, ‘What the heck is water?’[1] What’s the story? The fish had become so familiar with their daily lives and environment they forgot the very existence of the ‘water’ they were swimming in. Similarly, as Christians navigating between the world’s values and God’s, we can sometimes forget our identity in Christ.

As Christians walking between the world of darkness and the world of light, we must strive not to be consumed by the affairs of the world and to break free from our comfort zones. We see, in the Gospel, ‘the world’ signifies those who rebel against God, choose darkness over light and oppose the Creator.

We are sent into the world.

Jesus prays that his disciples would be his presence in the world—his body in this world. His prayer is not that we withdraw from the world but that we be the hands and feet of Christ in the world. In verse 18, Jesus says, ‘As the Father has sent me into the world, so have I sent them into the world.’ Friends, we haven’t been sent to this chair to merely worship, fellowship, and study the Scriptures, but above all, to do good works. Being ‘not of the world but sent into it’ means seeing and hearing things we hadn’t before. We start hearing the cries of our neighbour, advocating for those unfairly treated, and shedding light on the lives of marginalised groups. We speak out against wars that dehumanise and for truths that are hidden, we condemn violence that crushes the lives of our neighbours, and strive for the peace that God grants.

When we stand, Jesus stands with us, sanctifying that place into a holy sanctuary. This is the water we swim in, the water of holy opportunities to be the presence of Jesus. It’s where we open the eyes of the blind, proclaim freedom to the captives, and release the oppressed. This is why Jesus sends us into the world. Just as the Father sent Jesus, Jesus sends us. Hence, Psalm 1 guides us as ‘blessed ones,’ instructing us on how to live. We don’t walk in the ruts of those blind as bats; we don’t stand with the good for nothing, and we don’t take our seats among the know-it-alls. Instead we thrill to God’s Word, we chew on Scripture day and night. And we walk the righteous way and protected by the Lord.[2]

Jesus wants us to be the holy ones he sent into the world. Being holy means following the path of God’s truth as Jesus did during His earthly ministry, carrying out the work that Jesus began and trusting that the Father will gloriously complete it through us.

[1] This is Water by David Foster Wallace

[2] Psalm 1, Eugene Peterson’s Message Bible