What We Have Heard from the Beginning: The Past, Present and Future of Johannine Studies

12: Response: The Prologue and Jesus’ Final Prayer

228 JOHN F. O’GRADY of God”; in chapter 17, they have become holy and so are in fact the children of God. The prologue and chapter 17 have their poetic qualities . Both contain the principal theological themes of the entire Gospel, both come from the same community, and both possibly come from the homilies preached by the Beloved Disciple. Once within the Gospel of John, the reader or listener goes around and around, growing in an ever–deepening understanding of who Jesus was and what he meant to the Beloved Disciple and to his community, as well as what he means to the Christian community today. 229 What is the literary and theological relationship between the Johannine prologue (1:1–18) and the prayer of Jesus in John 17? As John O’Grady observes in his essay, to ask this question is to raise the wider issue of the relationship between the prologue and the Gospel. O’Grady is not the first to perceive the nexus between the prologue and the prayer, a nexus that, as he demonstrates, is both literary and theological. O’Grady leaves open the issue of whether or not the evangelist originally began with the prologue; he himself locates the origins of the Fourth Gospel in the preaching of the Beloved Disciple, but indicates the importance of reading the Gospel, as we now have it, through the lens of the prologue. His focus is—rightly, in my view—on the final form of the text, setting aside (though not discounting) questions of origin and prehistory. I would like to explore O’Grady’s parallels between the prologue and the final prayer a little further. In theological terms, both passages are concerned with Jesus’ identity. That identity is set out at the beginning in majestic terms, disclosing the Word in preexistent union with God (John 1:1–2), in the creation of the world (1:3–5), and in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, who belongs both to the heavenly domain of “glory” and the earthly realm of “flesh” (1:14). That same identity, unfolded for the reader in the intervening chapters through narrative and discourse, sign and symbol, faith and even rejection, is articulated in equally majestic 12: Response THE PROLOGUE AND JESUS’ FINAL PRAYER Dorothy Lee 230 DOROTHY LEE terms in Jesus’ great prayer. In other words, the two passages are neither identical nor proximate, but there is an interior correlation between them which, although not perhaps immediately obvious, is nevertheless more than we would expect. The relationship hardly exists in terms of genre, at least not in the narrow sense. The one passage is descriptive of Jesus’ provenance and identity—cosmic and earthly—providing a summation of Johannine theology, an overture that sets the mood and tone for the entire Gospel. The other is a prayer, the direct speech of Jesus himself, coming at the conclusion and as the climax of the Last Supper, in which Jesus recapitulates his ministry and prays for his disciples in the context of his impending death. In symbolic terms, however, the two can be seen as fundamentally connected; indeed, once the association is grasped, it is difficult to read the one passage without hearing the reverberances of the other. The correlation between these two passages can be seen symbolically at a number of levels that I can only touch on here and that O’Grady catalogues more fully. In the first place, what we initially discover of the connection between God and Word (qeo/j and lo/goj), encapsulated in the preposition proj (“before”; 1:1–2), by the end of the prologue resolves itself, via the incarnation, into the symbolic language of Father and Son (1:14, 18)—symbolism that perdures throughout the Gospel, superseding the more abstract language of the opening sentences. This theological and symbolic move is vibrantly depicted in the prayer, where it is Jesus who now testifies to his own identity and plays out that relationship that is the ground of his being: the eternal Word–Son “turned toward” the Father. Second, the symbolism of Father–Son, between prologue and prayer, has significantly expanded. This is a point O’Grady rightly stresses. The vague and unspecific “we” of John 1:14 has now become a tangible communion of believers who recognize Jesus’ identity as “the one sent from the Father”—those whose birth “from above” the reader has witnessed throughout...