John 17:1-8

Jesus Prays to Be Glorified

1 After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed:

"Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. 2 For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. 3 Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. 4 I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. 5 And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.

Jesus Prays for His Disciples

6 "I have revealed you to those whom you gave me out of the world. They were yours; you gave them to me and they have obeyed your word. 7 Now they know that everything you have given me comes from you. 8 For I gave them the words you gave me and they accepted them. They knew with certainty that I came from you, and they believed that you sent me.



Dig Deeper

I was pretty funny as a young Christian in a lot of ways (that’s funny, "faux pas," not funny, "ha, ha") . One of peculiar things about me at that time was that I did not want to pray with other people. It wasn’t that I was theologically opposed to it or anything quite so noble. When it comes down to it, it was a matter of pride. I felt like I wasn’t very good at praying and didn’t much know what to say and certainly knew that I couldn’t pray with the length and depth in the way that I had had heard some of the older Christians around me do. I actually got pretty creative about avoiding praying in public or with other people because I just didn’t want to do it, even to the point of intentionally asking the person I was having a morning quiet time with a deep biblical question so that they would have to answer and time would run out before we could pray and had to leave for work. In the years since then I’ve discovered that I really missed out in those early days. In a very real sense, you don’t know someone fully, at least concerning the depth of their relationship with God, until you’ve prayed with them. When you pray with someone who is really opening up their heart and soul to God, you discover who they are in a whole new way. You learn who they really are and what is really important to them.

We don’t get to spend time with Jesus the way the first disciples did. We don’t get to walk along the road with him, hear him teach, see what he looks like, or watch him laugh. In a very real sense, we will never know him like that in this present age. Yet, John has done something priceless for us here. He has preserved one of the most incredibly intimate and powerful passages of Scripture in the entire Bible. We are told quite often throughout the Gospels that Jesus regularly spent time alone with the Father in prayer. Yet, there are scant few instances where we are told how he prayed or what he prayed, and when we are it is usually just a few sentences at most. This passage is different, though. John gives us the most complete prayer from Jesus in the entire New Testament and although we’ll never walk with him as John did, we do get to know Jesus through this prayer in a special way. It’s as though John has quietly cracked open the door and quietly motioned us in to observe a quiet and sacred moment with the King himself. We can quietly watch, listen, and learn and feel like, if for only a moment, we were there with him too. We know something special and private about him.

Sometimes you reach a point where there’s nothing left to really say. Everything that you could possibly share with someone else has been said and it’s time to turn to God in prayer. It’s not that prayer is some sort of filler activity once you’ve exhausted all of the other possibilities. It’s that you just get to the point where the Spirit has led you to say what you need to say and there seems to be a solemn moment where the need for prayer becomes evident. Prayer caps things. It is a recognition that everything you’ve been saying or talking about will only happen if it is humbly turned over to God. Jesus knows that that time has come. He has told his disciples everything they need to know for now. He knows that he has reached the point where the only thing he can do is turn his eyes to God and pray.

In the opening prologue to the Gospel, John told us that Jesus was the Word, the logos that had become flesh (Jn. 1:14). He also told us that in the Word was life that would be made available to all men (Jn. 1:4). In the opening verses of Jesus’ prayer, we see both of those themes coming together. Everything that Jesus has done has not come from himself, nor has it been about himself. He seeks no glory for himself, but has done everything for the glory of the Father. His life and ministry have glorified the Father and now as he makes his way towards the Cross, he will glorify God to the fullest extent. The Father has given him a mission and full authority. But that authority was to bring judgment or condemnation, it was to bring eternal life.

The phrase "eternal life" meant something different in Jesus’ day than it tends to in ours. We tend to think of "eternal life" as the duration of time after our deaths when we go off to heaven to live forever. But that is precisely what Jesus and his followers did not mean by that phrase. "Eternal life" is a translation of the Greek phrase "zoe aionios" and it literally means "life of the ages" or "life of the age to come." The age to come was the time when God would restore the creation and return to dwell with His people in a restored world. Jesus does not deny that belief, rather he confirmed in during his life (Matt. 19:28), but what was surprising was that he taught that those who would die to themselves and enter into his life could have that life, could actually enter into the age to come while still in the present age. Those who did so would receive the Holy Spirit as a down payment guaranteeing that they would be part of the resurrection and enter into the full age to come one day.

Jesus came with life, this life of the age to come, within him. Those that were given to Jesus through the calling and grace of the Father would receive eternal life. What is eternal life, though, what is the life of that age in the present age? It is to know the only true God, to know Jesus and his life. Having the life of Christ and living it out, complete with the access that it brings to the Father, is the life of the age to come in the present, a life that anticipates the fully consummated age to come of which those in Christ will be a part one day. It is curious that Jesus would talk of himself in the third person here, praying that his disciples might know "Jesus Christ." Perhaps, we can speculate, that this is one point where John has changed the wording of the original prayer just slightly from "me" to "Jesus Christ" so that we can truly enter into this prayer and take it on as our own.

That eternal life has come in two ways. It has come first through the words that the Father gave him. The Word brought about the reality of the new creation through his words. The Logos has brought the logos that will restore justice and order to the universe. Those who obeyed this logos have come to the life of the Logos and found the life of the age to come. Those who accepted that word and obeyed can actually enter into the life of it. In the ancient way of thinking, the word of God was an oracle. Oracles were actually viewed with great sanctity because they were believed to have come directly from God and carry the power of that God. If we recall that in Greek thought, the logos was the ordering principle of the universe, we begin to see what Jesus is saying here and what John wants us to see. Everything that Jesus has said has come from God and those words were actually bringing about the restoration of the creation. Those who embraced and obeyed those words could become a part of the reconciliation itself (cf. 2 Cor. 5:16-21).

Above all else, what really stands out as we go through this prayer that John has preserved for us is the invitation to catch a glimpse of the relationship between Jesus and the Father. That’s the beauty of praying with someone else, or in this case being able to "hear" Jesus’ prayer. Normally, I don’t truly know what goes on between you and God. But our prayers are a window into the true relationship between someone and God. What we see here is that Jesus’ inner relationship with God is exactly the same dynamic that he has described throughout his ministry. He looks to the Father for guidance. He waits on the Father’s timing, only acting when the hour has come as directed by the Father. Everything he does is about bringing glory to the Father and only asking that he be glorified or allowed to express himself fully so that his own glorification will actually serve the purpose of bringing full glory to the Father. That isn’t just something he claimed to others, it’s something he embraced and celebrated in his relationship with the Father. He has ushered in the new creation, but has done so because it is the work the Father gave him to do. He desperately wishes to return to the presence and relationship that he had with the Father eternally.

It is striking that above all else, Jesus wants nothing more than to be in perfect and intimate relationship with God. John doesn’t try to delve into the theology of how all that works but simply wants to show us the majesty of the eternal and unbreakable relationship between Jesus and the Father. The relationship is so close that Jesus recognizes that everything he has comes from the Father and everything he does is in accordance with the Father’s will. At the most intense and difficult moment of his life, Jesus doesn’t shrink back or stop for one moment because he knows the intimacy that he and the Father share. He knows that he has spoken the words that the Father gave him and that those who accept those words will enter into and enjoy the same relationship with the Father that he has. The very heart of this prayer, though, is more about others than about Jesus himself. As we will see in the next section, this prayer is not just a celebration of the relationship between the Father and the Son but an invitation for us to join into that relationship and share in everything that the Son has with the Father.



Devotional Thought

One thing that we see clearly here is that Jesus’ public life and ministry reflected the same and very genuine relationship that he had with the Father. There was no pretension and no putting on a show for others. Can you say the same about yourself? Are you the same in public, in private, and in prayer? Do you take action on the things that you pray about so that if someone were to listen to your prayers they would see those same things manifested in your life?