Jesus encloses His prayer between the two parts of that repeated
statement of the disciples' isolation. It is like some lovely, peaceful
plain circled by grim mountains. The isolation is a necessary
consequence of the disciples' previous union with Him. It involves much
that is painful to the unrenewed part of their natures, but their
Lord's prayer is more than enough for their security and peace.
'I pray not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world.' They are
in it by God's appointment for great purposes, affecting their own
characters and affecting the world, with which Christ will not
interfere. It is their training ground, their school. The sense of
belonging to another order is to be intensified by their experiences in
it, and these are to make more vivid the hopes that yearn towards the
true home, and to develop the 'wrestling thews that throw the world.'
The discipline of life is too precious to be tampered with even by a
Saviour's prayer, and He loves His people too wisely to seek to shelter
them from its roughness, and to procure for them exemption which would
impoverish their characters.
So let us learn the lesson and shape our desires after the pattern of
our Lord's prayer for us, nor blindly seek for that ease which He would
not ask for us. False asceticism that shrinks from contact with an
alien world, weak running from trials and temptations, selfish desires
for exemption from sorrows, are all rebuked by this prayer. Christ's
relation to the world is our pattern, and we are not to seek for
pillows in an order of things where He 'had not where to lay His head.'
But He does ask for His people that they may be kept 'from evil,' or
from 'the evil One.' That prayer is, as we have said, a promise and a
prophecy. But the fulfilment of it in each individual disciple hinges
on the disciple's keeping himself in touch with Jesus, whereby the
'much virtue' of His prayer will encompass him and keep him safe. We do
not discuss the alternative renderings, according to one of which 'the
evil' is impersonal, and according to the other of which it is
concentrated in the personal 'prince of this world.' In either case, it
is 'the evil' against which the disciples are to be guarded, whether it
has a personal source or not.
Here, in Christ's intercession, is the firm ground of our confidence
that we may be 'more than conquerors' in the life-long fight which we
have to wage. The sweet strong old psalm is valid in its assurances
to-day for every soul which puts itself under the shadow of Christ's
protecting intercession: 'The Lord shall keep thee from all evil, He
shall keep thy soul.' We have not 'to lift up our eyes unto the hills,'
for 'vainly is help hoped for from the multitude of the mountains,' but
'Our help cometh from the Lord which made heaven and earth.' Therefore
we may dwell at peace in the midst of an alien world, having the Father
for our Keeper, and the Son, who overcame the world, for our
Intercessor, our Pattern and our Hope.
The parallel between Christ and His people applies to their relations
to the present order of things: 'They are not of the world, even as I
am not of the world.' It applies to their mission here: 'As Thou didst
send Me into the world, even so sent I them into the world.' It applies
to the future: 'I am no more in the world, but these are in the world,
and I come to Thee,' and in that 'coming' lies the guarantee that His
servants will, each in his due time, come out from this alien world and
pass into the state which is home, because He is there. The prayer that
they might be kept from the evil, while remaining in the scene where
evil is rampant, is crowned by the prayer: 'I will that, where I am,
they also may be with Me, that they may behold My glory.'