John 17:18-19

“ According as thou hast sent me into the world, I also have sent them into the world. 19. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth. ”

If Jesus asks for them the spirit of their charge (John 17:17), it is because He has confided to them the charge itself. The term ἀπέστειλα, I have sent, alludes to the title of apostles which He has given them. But how does Jesus say that He has sent them into the world, when they are already in it? It is because He has drawn them to Himself and raised them into a higher sphere than the life of the world (John 17:16), and it is from thence that He now sends them to the world, as really as He was Himself sent from heaven. And the mission which He gives them is only the continuation of that which the Father has given Him (καθώς, according as); herein is the first reason which He presses in support of His petition: Sanctify them.

The second is set forth in John 17:19. The force of καί, and, at the beginning of this verse, is this: “And to obtain for them this consecration which I ask for, I begin by consummating my own.” Jesus asks nothing of the Father except after having done, or when doing Himself what depends on Himself to the end of making possible the realization of His prayer; comp. John 17:4; John 17:6; John 17:8; John 17:12; John 17:14. It is on what He does for His own sanctification that theirs will be founded. The words ὑπὲρ αὐτῶν, for them, are at the beginning because they set forth the aim of His work with reference to Himself. The word sanctify does not by any means imply, as we have seen, the removal of defilement; for it is not synonymous with purify (καθαρίζειν); it is therefore a wrong course in some interpreters to find in this word a proof of the existence of sin in Jesus.

The majority of interpreters (Chrysostom, Meyer, Reuss, Weiss, etc.) apply this word to the consecration which Jesus makes of His person at this moment in view of His expiatory death. Weiss sustains this meaning by the ordinary use of the word hiquedisch in the Old Testament to designate the idea of sacrificing. But this last reason proves nothing; for this term, as well as the Greek word, designates all consecration, even that which does not issue in death; comp. Matthew 23:17, which we have just cited. And this sense is not admissible here, because it is inapplicable in the following clause, unless we see, with Chrysostom, in the sanctification of the apostles their acceptance of martyrdom, or refer it, as Meyer and Reuss do, to the gift of the Holy Spirit as the result of the expiatory death, or give up, as Weiss does, assigning the same meaning to the verb ἁγιάζειν in the two clauses, and find therein a special nicety of expression; all which interpretations are quite improbable, the first, because the greater part of the apostles do not seem to have been martyrs; the second, because the relation between the two acts of consecration would be much too indirect; the third, because the ἵνα, that, as well as the καί, them also, implies two consecrations of a homogeneous character. We must, therefore, with Calvin, abide by the natural meaning of ἁγιάζειν : to take a thing away from a profane use in order to consecrate it to the service of God. Jesus possessed a human nature, such as ours, endowed with inclinations and repugnances like ours, but yet perfectly lawful. Of this nature He continually made a holy offering; negatively, by sacrificing it where it was in contradiction to His mission (the culture of the arts and sciences, for example, or the family life); positively, in consecrating to the task assigned Him of God all His powers, all His natural and spiritual talents.

It is thus “ that He offered Himself to God without spot, through the eternal Spirit ” (Hebrews 9:14). When the question was of sacrificing a gratification, as in the desert, or of submitting to a sorrow, as in Gethsemane, He incessantly subjected His nature to the work to which the will of the Father called Him. And this was not effected once for all. His human life received the seal of consecration increasingly even till the entire and final sacrifice of death, when “by the things which He suffered” He finished the “learning obedience” (Hebrews 5:8).

The pronouns I and myself set forth the energetic action which Jesus was obliged to exercise upon Himself in order to attain this result.

Thereby Jesus realized in His own person the perfect consecration of the human life, and He thus laid the foundations of the consecration of this life in all His followers. This is what is expressed by the following clause: That they also may be sanctified, which develops the meaning of the first words: for them. According to Weiss, Jesus speaks here of a purely negative fact: the removal through the expiatory sacrifice of Christ of the guilt resulting from the defilements contracted by the believer, a guilt which would prevent his consecration to God. This is to fail to recognize the difference in meaning between the two terms sanctify and purify, and arbitrarily to change the meaning which the word sanctify had in the preceding clause. The meaning is indeed as follows: The sanctification of every believer is nothing else than the communication which Jesus makes to him of His own sanctified person. This is what He had already intimated in John 6:53-57; John 6:63, and what St. Paul develops in Romans 8:1-3, where he shows that Christ began by condemning sin in the flesh (condemned to non-existence), in order that the (moral) righteousness, required by the law, might be realized in us. Jesus created a holy humanity in His person, and the Spirit has the task and the power to reproduce in us this new humanity: “ The law of the Spirit of life which is in Jesus Christ has made me free from the law of sin and death. ” In this point, as in all others, the part of the Spirit consists in taking what belongs to Jesus (this perfectly holy human life), to give it to us. If this holy life had not been realized in Christ, the Spirit would have nothing to communicate to us in this regard, and the sanctification of humanity would have remained a barren aspiration. It is difficult to understand how Weiss can say that, with this interpretation, everything is reduced to the imitation of the example of Christ.

Let us remark finally that by reason of John 17:17, the question here is of the apostles, not only as Christians, but especially as ministers (John 17:18). Jesus Himself, while sanctifying Himself as man and for the purpose of realizing in Himself the ideal of human holiness, sanctified Himself at the same time as Saviour and for the purpose of giving life to mankind. In the same way, the task of the apostles will not only be to realize the consecration in that general form under which all believers are called to it; by freeing them from every earthly vocation and sending them into the world as His ambassadors, Jesus desired that their personal sanctification might be effected under the particular form of the apostleship. This form is not more holy, but it has, more than any earthly vocation, the character of a special consecration to the work of God. ᾿Εν ἀληθείᾳ, in truth, must have here, because of the want of the article, the adverbial sense: in a true way, in opposition both to the false Pharisaic consecration and to the ritual consecration of the Levitical priesthood. Thus from the general petition: I pray for them, there have been evolved these two clearly progressive petitions: “ Keep them in holiness! Consecrate them by an increasing holiness, to the end that they may become, after me and like me, the agents of the sanctification of the world.” It is natural that Jesus should pass from this to a prayer on behalf of the world itself, at least as to the future believing portion of it, John 17:20-26. Jesus prays for the believers and asks for them two things: John 17:20-21, spiritual unity; John 17:22-24, participation in His glory; finally, He justifies these petitions in John 17:25-26.