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Ascension on the Cross

John 17.1-11 (https://www.biblegateway.com NRSVA)
In Luke’s Gospel Jesus ascends to God from a mountaintop, lifted up on a cloud. In John’s Gospel Jesus is lifted up on a cross. The passage ends with the assurance that Jesus and his ‘Holy Father’ are ‘one’, but for John this is a moral unity, a unity of purpose, rather than a metaphysical union of two natures, human and divine. They are ‘one’ because Jesus has ‘completed the work that [God] gave him to do,’ (verse 4).
That work was ‘to make God’s name known’, to share the words that God had given him, to gather around himself a group of trusted disciples who ‘know the truth’, and to be recognised as the one whom God sent, ‘Jesus Messiah’ - the Anointed One. We know from John’s description of Jesus’ death, and from other passages in the Gospel, that the decisive hour when that work was completed was on the Cross, when Jesus was glorified by God so that he in turn might give glory back to God and confirm God’s true nature as the suffering servant.
The tie in with the Ascension is that, as a consequence of his obedience to God in accepting death on a cross, Jesus is now ‘glorified in God’s ‘presence’ or ‘God’s self’, or ‘at ‘God’s side’, with the same glory that he had ‘with God’ or ‘at God’s side before the world existed,’ (verse 5). We are reminded of the opening words of the Gospel, ‘The Word was with God and the Word was God,’ (John 1.1). To those who have ‘accepted him’ ‘he gives the power’ or ‘the right to become children of God,’ (John 1.12). Or, as John puts it here, ‘they believed that you sent me’ (verse 8) and this means that they can share in the unity which God and Jesus enjoy.

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