"Holy Father, keep those you have given me true to your name, so that they may be one like us. While I was with them, I kept those you had given me true to your name" (John 17:11-12).
In Sunday’s Gospel, our lectionary translation opts for a variant in the manuscript tradition, but the other option is worth investigating, especially since it has become the more accepted text.
The other option would read "Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one. While I was with them, I kept them in your name, which you have given me."
So on this reading, the Father does not give us rather his name to Jesus.
Of course, the Father does not call Jesus his "father", but he does let Jesus call himself "I am" throughout John’s Gospel: this is the divine name revealed to Moses (Exodus 3:14). And even if Jesus is never called "father" he does love us as his Father has loved him (John 15:9), and so he receives his Father’s spiritual paternity in order to love us without limit.
Jesus also refers to his Father’s name: he has come in his Father’s name (5:43), he works in that name (10:25) and he tells him "Father glorify your name" (12:28). His last reference to his Father’s name is that he has manifested it to his disciples and he will do so in the future (17:26).
But what does it mean to "keep" us in the Father’s name?
At one level, the name of God is a way of describing his divine identity: if the Father keeps us in his name, he keeps us in his divinity. This is a reality not just a pious phrase or a mental projection: we really are children of God by baptism, sharing his divine life.
But a <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/i-have-called-you-by-name-the-importance-of-christian-names-in-a-world-of-gender-ideology/"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">name is relational</mark></a> and implies a conversation. If we are "kept" in the name of the Father, it implies we are calling on him.
Jesus says he "kept" us in the Father’s name but now that he is to die and ascend, he asks the Father himself to carry on "keeping" us in it.
Jesus kept us calling on the Father by teaching us to pray "Our Father". Now he asks the Father to do the same, which will be the work of the Holy Spirit: "God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” (Galatians 4:6).
If we let Jesus and the Holy Spirit keep the Father’s name on our lips and hearts, then we have nothing to fear.<br><br><em>Photo: ‘Benediction of God the Father’, circa 1565, by Luca Cambiaso (1527–1585); image in the public domain.</em>
