Glorify Your Son

PASSAGE FOR THE DAY:

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. (John 17:1-5, NIV)

REFLECTIONS:

We now turn to what has become known as the "great high priestly prayer." Jesus takes upon himself the task that had always been the high priest's task: interceding on behalf of the people of God. In this case he prays for his own disciples and the spreading network of others who would come to believe through their work. This is a beautiful scene of intimacy between Jesus and his Father. Over the next few days we will walk slowly through this prayer, savoring every step along the way.

Today, as we reflect on Jesus' farewell to his followers, we see it in terms of Jesus as the priest, standing between the Father and the rest of us. He is the one through whom the love of God flows to us, and through whom—astonishingly—our response of love to the Father flows back again in gratitude. Jesus draws together in this prayer all the work that he has done—walking through Galilean villages, preaching the kingdom, healing the sick, celebrating the kingdom with outcasts and outsiders, confronting the self-appointed guardians of Israel's traditions, and coming to Jerusalem, as Messiah, to complete his God-given work.

As he starts this prayer, he looks up to heaven with the words: "Father, the hour has come" (verse 1). We have already seen from John 12 that Jesus knew the hour had come when the Greeks came to the feast and sought to see him. We were reminded at the beginning of John 13 of how Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from the world and return to the Father. And now he says to his Father that the hour has indeed come. At the heart of the whole prayer is the request that the Father will glorify the Son so that the Son may glorify the Father. That is to say, that God will so act now, at this moment, through Jesus, that Jesus himself may be exalted, lifted up on the cross to draw all people to himself. Jesus asks this so that he may complete the work for which he came into the world, thereby bringing glory to God. It is the quintessence of Jesus' prayer—and perhaps of any prayer—that the Father would work to glorify his name in the world, so that the deeds of his people, specifically in this case his Son, will in turn bring him glory.

Jesus knows that, as the Messiah, he has been given authority (verse 2). If we read back in the Old Testament—in the Psalms and in the prophets—we find again and again that when God finally sends his true anointed king, this king will have dominion from one sea to another, from the Great River to the ends of the earth. Jesus is aware of his calling to be Israel's Messiah, not in the way that Israel thought, but in the way that God had designed from all eternity. And the Messiah comes in order to bring to birth the new age for which Israel has hungered and longed. Israel had suffered a long time in what they called the old-age, and they longed for the new age to be born—which they called "the age to come." Unfortunately, almost all modern English Bibles translate the relevant Greek phrase as "eternal life," and we are easily misled into thinking that eternal life has nothing to do with the old Jewish expectation. For us, "eternal life" tends to mean escaping from space and time into a distant and mysterious "heaven." But this is an idea that bears no relation to the Jewish thought of Jesus and the writer of this Gospel.

As Messiah, Jesus has authority, not only to inaugurate the age to come, but to take into that new age all those whom God has given him. So, what will this new age look like? It will begin with Jesus dying the death that is the final seal on Israel's exile, then bursting forth from the grave to be the beginning of God's new creation. All those who know him will, through him, come to know God himself, and we must remind ourselves here that the verb "to know" in the Bible has much deeper and more intimate meaning than in modern English. In some mysterious way, we will come to "know" God with the same sort of intimacy as a husband "knows" his wife when they are making love. (That's enough to make you pause and wonder.) Belonging to the new age means knowing God deeply and intimately, knowing down in our bones that he is the only true God, and knowing that all other gods are idols. And as children of God's new age, we know that Jesus is the Messiah, sent by God.

In verse 4, Jesus moves on to look at what he has done: he has glorified God on earth by finishing the work given him to do. Jesus has a wonderful serenity about him. There were many lepers in Israel who had not been cleansed, many widows whose only sons had died and not been raised to life. There were many crippled people left unhealed, many demoniacs tortured by unclean spirits. There were many poor people still unable to feed themselves, many prisoners yet to be freed. But Jesus has finished the specific word that God gave him. It was not his task to right the world's wrongs overnight. It was his task to confront evil and defeat it—and he has now accomplished this. All that remained was to finish the new accomplishment of that work on the cross. Knowing this, he asks his Father to glorify him with the glory that he had in God's presence before the world existed.

I don't think this means that Jesus could, in his human memory, recall a time when he was united in his pre-incarnate existence with the Father and the Holy Spirit, enjoying the relationship of the blessed Trinity. Rather, I believe it to mean that he knew it was his task as Messiah to accomplish upon the earth that which, according to Scripture, only the one true God could accomplish. He knew deep within himself that this meant he was the expression, the embodiment, even the incarnation, of the one true God.

The beginning of this prayer is an extraordinary statement of faith and calling. Jesus is going to the horror of the cross, praying that the God who made the world, the God who called Israel, the God who had called him to be Messiah, would be glorified and will glorify him. This is a prayer that, to begin with, demands that we simply stand back and reflect on it in wonder and awe. Through our reflection, however, and in particular through the celebration of Communion—commemorating Jesus' last supper—we can find ourselves enfolded within the prayer. We can discover ourselves to be the ones for whom Jesus was praying, those who know the only true God and Jesus the Messiah who had been sent by him. As we meditate on him as he makes his way to Gethsemane, to betrayal, to trial, crucifixion, we watch with love and awe, seeing Jesus glorified in God's presence, and God glorified in him.

PRAYER:

Lord Jesus, only Son of the living God, pray for us now, that we may know the Father through knowing you. We glorify your name, standing in awe of the way you embraced the suffering of the cross so that your Father might be honored and that our redemption might be paid. We bless you and praise you, asking that you might draw us into greater intimacy with yourself and with your Father—an intimacy we long to experience even this very day as we go about our regular routines.

WHO AM I?

I am Tres Sansom, and I am blown away by the serenity and contentment of Jesus. Here, in this passage, he knows that he will be arrested within a matter of minutes. He knows that an unspeakable amount of torture is coming his way very soon. And yet, he is able to stand in prayer to his Father, displaying a peacefulness of heart and mind that is astounding!