This Is Eternal Life - Reflections on John 17:1-7, Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year A

by John C. Holbert on Thursday, March 19, 2026

         John 17 presents to us Jesus’ final address to his disciples and through the disciples to us, the readers. It is an exceedingly high-flown, richly theological speech, befitting the portrayal of Jesus throughout this Gospel. Whenever I have attempted to assess the language of John, I have often wondered how such a speech as this one would have been heard in, for example, Mark’s community. I can only imagine the furrowed brows and puzzled looks as they tried to fathom just what this Jesus is going on about! It is as clear in this speech as it gets in John that the gnostic belief system lies in the background of Jesus’s farewell language.

         It has long been acknowledged that the complex and varied system of beliefs known as Gnosticism (from the Greek gnosis—“knowledge”) was a religious thought and practice widespread in the Graeco-Roman world in the first centuries of the Christian era. Among early Christian thinkers, Gnosticism was viewed as a dangerous threat to emerging Christianity, although it is clear that Christians sometimes borrowed from Gnosticism both symbols and language to express their faith. Perhaps the central tenet of Gnostic belief was the conviction that salvation could only be had by the deliverance of the eternal spirit, now imprisoned in the world, back to its eternal home by means of a secret knowledge, the gnosis,that only could affect this freedom from a base material, earthly life. One of the myths that spoke of this act of freeing the spirit mentioned a divine deliverer who comes from a kingdom of light in disguise, evades the evil powers of darkness who stand guard over the enslaved world, releases the captive spirits of light, and gives to them the secret password, the gnosis, that will enable them to return to their eternal home.

         It hardly takes much imagination to see how this mythology could easily be affixed to an understanding of the work of Jesus as the deliverer of those trapped in the world, who promises them a trip to the eternal world, after freeing them from their earthly bondage. In fact, at least two early Christian theologians, Valentinus in the second century and Basilides, a near contemporary, expressed their Christian beliefs in precisely these gnostic terms. However, three serious obstacles were seen by more orthodox Christian theologians to call such gnostic beliefs into question. John’s Gospel could be said to have seen these same problems and dealt with them in unique ways.

         First, the Gnostics necessarily possessed a deeply pessimistic view of earthly creation. After all, if the spirit was trapped in the material world, and needed release from that captivity, that which held it captive was evil. Such a belief flew directly in the face of the goodness of God’s creation, enshrined plainly in Genesis and in many psalms. Indeed, in John’s most famous lines, God sent Jesus, the divine deliverer, into the world precisely in order to save that world, not to condemn it as something evil, but to make it whole again (John 3:16-17). Second, a related belief claimed that human bodily life was depreciated as far below the pure world of light to be found in the place of eternity. And that belief led to a third problem that led gnostic Christians to deny the real humanity of Jesus. If the bodily world was somehow evil, and less than the the divine world, how could the deliverer Jesus ever be said to be human in any way? Such a belief led to the widespread view that Jesus in reality was not a human being, but only “seemed” (dokeo in Greek) to be human while on earth, hence the idea of “docetism,” judged a heresy by the church early in the third century.

         John, though his Jesus portrayal is decidedly exalted, never assumes that he is not a human being, albeit at the same time the pre-existent son of God. This belief lies in the background of John 17:5: “and now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory I had with you before the world was made.” Jesus was certainly human on the earth, but also knows that he was preexistent with God as God’s living word “before the world was made” (see John 1). The human Jesus will suffer and die on the cross—there is no “seeming” about these facts for John—but that same human Jesus will be glorified in those acts by the God who sent him to the earth. 

         John defines in these verses once again for his readers exactly what “eternal life” is: “And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3). In short, eternal life is not merely some place in the sky where believers go when they die; eternal life (aionios zoe) is in fact the “knowledge of” (note the gnostic reference to knowing) the true God who is made known to us through the one God sent, Jesus Christ. That of course means that eternal life is possible now, in this life, through the knowledge of God and Christ. Gnostic language swims just below the surface of Christian belief for John, but eternal life is not reserved only for those with some kind of secret knowledge. To the contrary! Jesus Christ was sent by God to make the knowledge of that God available to all now, and eternal life may be gained by any with that knowledge.