I Pray Not For the World
Gospel Reflection for May 16, 2026, the Seventh Sunday of Easter - John 17:1-11a
1 These things Jesus spoke, and lifting up his eyes to heaven, he said: Father, the hour is come, glorify thy Son, that thy Son may glorify thee.
2 As thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he may give eternal life to all whom thou hast given him.
3 Now this is eternal life: That they may know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.
4 I have glorified thee on the earth; I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do.
5 And now glorify thou me, O Father, with thyself, with the glory which I had, before the world was, with thee.
6 I have manifested thy name to the men whom thou hast given me out of the world. Thine they were, and to me thou gavest them; and they have kept thy word.
7 Now they have known, that all things which thou hast given me, are from thee:
8 Because the words which thou gavest me, I have given to them; and they have received them, and have known in very deed that I came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me.
9 I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them whom thou hast given me: because they are thine:
10 And all my things are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified in them.
11 And now I am not in the world, and these are in the world, and I come to thee.
(John 17:1-11a DRA)
While reading or listening to Our Lord’s High Priestly prayer, during His Farewell Discourse in St. John’s Gospel, it can be easy to overlook important points of what He says. The rhetorical dialogue is very smooth and quick, rapidly interconnecting Himself, the Father and His disciples, so that smaller details can become overshadowed and neglected.
But in today’s Gospel, Our Lord says what is one of the most poignant and what for us should be profoundly chilling statements in all the Gospels: “I pray not for the world”. This verse disproves the sentimental delusion of the ‘nice’ Jesus, as opposed to the ‘mean’ Jesus who is more often compared with the ‘God of the Old Testament,’ as if there is any distinction in the divine essence or any contradiction between His justice and mercy.
This statement reveals something that the modern world usually prefers to forget: that the Kingdom of God is not of this world, that the dominion of Satan is not the same as the Reign of God, and that each of us belongs to one or the other, with either Christ or Satan as our king. As St. Augustine teaches,
When He adds, I pray not for the world, by the world He means those who live according to the lust of the world, and have not the lot to be chosen by grace out of the world, as those had for whom He prayed: But for them which Thou hast given Me. It was because the Father had given Him them, that they did not belong to the world. Nor yet had the Father, in giving them to the Son, lost what He had given: For they are Thine.
Our Lord says that He will give eternal life to those who belong to Him, whom the Father has given Him. But in the next verse, He says, “While I was with them, I kept them in thy name. Those whom thou gavest me have I kept; and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition, that the scripture may be fulfilled.” (Jn 17:12) This speaks, of course, of Judas Iscariot, who did not receive eternal life precisely because He did not truly belong to Christ but to the world. The son of perdition, who betrayed the Son of God, did not believe what He told them, unlike the other eleven apostles, and so did not receive the gift of sonship which Christ offered to the rest.
In today’s Gospel, He extends this to those who are kindred spirits of Judas, who belong to the world and not to Christ because they do not know Him or believe in Him. Christ does not pray for these, because only those who are willing to receive His love and grace are worth praying for. This is why He once told the Pharisees, “Therefore I said to you, that you shall die in your sins. For if you believe not that I am he, you shall die in your sin.” (Jn 8:24) He thus condemned them to the same fate as Judas: eternal damnation. By rejecting He who is Life, they received only death. As God, Christ knew who was predestined to eternal life or reprobated to damnation, and so He knew that prayers for these would be pointless, although He still tells us, who can know the eternal fates only of those whom Scripture and Tradition has revealed to us, to pray for our enemies.
This is an important follow-up message for the Feast of the Ascension, which we celebrated last Thursday (or today for many of us). The Great Commission which Our Lord gave to the apostles was not arbitrary or just an initiation into a fun club where membership is more of a bonus than a necessity. No – to be baptized and made a disciple of Christ is to be born again as His adopted sibling and to be registered as a citizen of the Kingdom of God. Without this, we will not receive the immortal life promised to all those who belong to Him. But even if we are siblings of Christ and citizens of the Kingdom, if we do not persevere in our divine calling and remain in His grace, we will be cut off, exiled from the Kingdom like Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, and receive the same fate as Judas.
This is why it is such a tragedy and a scandal that missionary efforts by Catholics have decreased so drastically in recent decades. The heresies of liberalism, pluralism and universalism have led so many Catholics to believe that going to Hell is practically impossible and that simply being a ‘nice person’ is all God really asks of us. How many Catholics today ever consider the possibility that they could go to Hell? This was an ever-present reality for our Catholic forebears, but for us, we live our lives and sin bravely, rarely going to Confession and regularly denying the teachings of the Church, while still assuming we will be saved.
With this mentality, why would we go to the trouble of evangelizing others? What urgency is there to convert anyone to Catholicism, if most everyone is already guaranteed salvation, and if my own salvation is assured whether I preach the Gospel or not? But Our Lord asks much more of us. We are called to be “ambassadors” (2 Cor 4:20) of Christ to the world, to lead all men into the Kingdom of God and to liberate them from slavery to Satan in the world. May we remember this great calling we all share as Christians, keeping in mind the words of Our Lord:
Every one therefore that shall confess me before men, I will also confess him before my Father who is in heaven. But he that shall deny me before men, I will also deny him before my Father who is in heaven. (Mt 10:32-33)
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