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Jesus speaks, "I no longer call you servants, because a master doesn't confide in his servants. Now you are my friends, since I have told you everything the Father told me." (John 15.15, NLV)
This passage speaks, historically, of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth to his first followers. Through his teaching the relationship with his disciples had changed over time. Jesus, being open about what he was given by Spirit and his framing of that in the works and words of his culture, had created a relationship with his followers based on honest disclosure from him to them. Jesus could not withhold this disclosure, if he willed to grow into a deepening union with his students. He had to risk being misunderstood to move his relationship with his followers to a deeper, deepening level.
What does this passage in St. John mean to each of us? In this passage is articulated a universalized message that transcends Jesus and his historical context. Three aspects stand out to me: the idea of friendship between the teacher and his students; the process of disclosure from the teacher to his followers; the reference "my Father."
When we enter the contemplative life, we grow to have an amazing, fruitful familiarity with the living Christ. The living Christ is another reference for the Wisdom (Greek, sophia) in Jesus. Jesus is rightly noted by modern Christian scholars to have been a wisdom teacher, a teacher of insight, as stressed in late pre-Christian Judaism and Greek thought.
We transcend the idea of following Jesus as historical person only; we take that following into a higher inclusion of the Word that was in Jesus and is in us, now and always, eternally. We no longer just follow Jesus. We follow the Christ as the universalized, living, and all-inclusive Word (Greek, logos), which John says preceded Jesus, being timeless and boundless. This logos is sophia.
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The same Word is in all things. Jesus can be for anyone the beginning, the historical referent, however, the ideas Christ, Logos, Teacher, … take on universal, trans-historical implications. In this sense, Jesus transcends time and integrates time with Eternity, Word with word, and particularizes the universal Wisdom in God.
With this understanding we can say that the Teacher in Jesus is the Word that has manifested in many times, ways, and wise persons. Jesus embodied the universal Truth, but Jesus tried to point us to "the Father," the Source of Wisdom, the Beginning of the Word. This to me is clear from the Gospels. To believe this is not disrespectful to Jesus, but respectful of his role as chosen by God, the one he calls “my Father,” as Jesus speaks in the Gospel.
The contemplative honors Jesus by identifying with the sign of Jesus. That is, Jesus signifies for us what is greater than the historical man or any person. Jesus was and is a living sign. People were drawn to Jesus, for he transcended his time and culture in living and incarnating the timeless, living Truth. We honor Jesus by not reducing him to the historical, religious-political term Messiah, or Christ. That is indication, sign, shadow; however, the contemplative enters into the spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of Christ. Ultimately, of course, the contemplative transcends all signs and realizes the inner meaning in Union with God, where he enjoys intimate union with Christ Jesus. This is the true meaning of Christian mysticism.
In mysticism all words in the Word meet and all truth finds its beginning and end in Truth. One is not, technically, contemplative as long as she still gives the Word any exclusive, privileged place in one person or path. Contemplatives are all-embracing by orientation, because they are in communion and union with the Universal, Universalizing Spirit. This is why I say that not all who do "contemplative" prayer are contemplatives.
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