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that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in Me and I in you.  May they also may be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.  John 17:21 (NIV)

May Be One – In my city, there are 700 churches.  That fact alone must break the heart of Jesus.  When the Western world abandoned the Hebrew view of community, we set ourselves on a course toward moral and spiritual plurality.  The end of that road is the Greek ideal:  every man an island to himself.  Today, our religious topography is far more Greek than Hebrew, each man or group of men claiming spiritual authority. 

But if you thought that Jesus’ prayer was about giving up our self-righteous religious separateness, you didn’t read the verb.  Jesus does not pray, “that they may become one.”  He is not interested in a divine ecumenicalism.  He prays “that they may be one.”  The Greek is pantas hen osin (“all one may be”).  The verb tells us that this is an already-established unity, not a unity that we must strive to create.  Furthermore, it is a unity that treats all disciples as an undifferentiated whole, continually combined in community with Jesus.  It is a unity that results from mutual abiding because of an attitude of active submission.  It is a blessed harmony, brought about by the unity of the Son and the Father. 

What this means is that the human effort to bring agreement between the 700 churches in my city will never fulfill Jesus’ petition.  What Jesus asks, and grants, is a deeper community of mind, will and emotion so that you and I share the same Lord and the same desire to obey Him.  It is unity of heart that brings me into unity with other followers – and I don’t really care what religious label the world puts on any of us.  I am a Jesus’ follower, plain and simple.  If you are a Jesus’ follower, then you and I are intimately related because He made it so.

John emphasizes this united community by placing the Greek pantas (all) right next to the Greek hen (one).  It echoes a motto of the Musketeers: “One in all and all in one.”  Are we surprised?  Hopefully not.  From Genesis 2:24 onward, God has been fashioning symbolic representations of the unity of believers.  If I am in Christ and you are in Christ, Christ is not divided into parts.  There is only one Lord.  And since Christ Himself tells us that He is in perfect unity with the Father, my transition from this broken world to His world puts me in perfect unity with the Father too.

All that is left is to act accordingly.