Jesus' Prayer for Glory
John 17:1-5
John 17:1-5 - 1When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, 2since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. 3And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. 4I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. 5And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.
Jesus Is…
- The Son of God – “Father…” (v.1)
- The Suffering Servant – “my hour has come” (v.1)
- The King of Kings – “authority over all flesh” (v.2)
- The Life-Giver – “to give eternal life” (v.3)
- The Second Adam – “having accomplished the work that you gave me to do” (v.4)
- The Eternal One – “the glory that I had with you before the world existed” (v.5)
What do you think of people who want to be made much of? What comes to mind when you are watching a football game and a guy makes a regular tackle and then gets up pounding his chest and dancing around like a witchdoctor? What goes through your head when you’re at a party or you’re reconnecting with an old friend and all she can talk about is herself? (She’s what comedian Brian Regan would call a “Me Monster” – You, me! You, me!) What do you think of when somebody engages in shameless self-promotion (like Sherriff Joe Arpaio at the FBR Open). On a bit more serious note, what comes to your mind when you hear about some new cult leader who is claiming to be God? You watch clips on TV of people following this person into destructive and awful things (think Hale-Bopp Comet people).
When we see people like this or when we’re around friends (or teenagers) who are completely self-absorbed it leaves us with a bad taste in our mouth. There’s something discouraging about it when we see it in our friends and something demented about it when we see it in cult leaders.
But today, in the first part of Jesus’ prayer, we see him asking for the very thing that we despise in others: glory. Look at verse 1: he says, “glorify your Son.” In verse 5 he says, “glorify me in your own presence.” Throughout these five verses, the only thing that Jesus requests is glory. This raises some questions. 1) If it’s despicable for other people to seek their own glory, then why is it okay for Jesus to do so? 2) What is it about Jesus that makes his request not just tolerable, but actually something that is just and right and necessary?
In these five verses we see at least six things about who Jesus is. All of them demonstrate that he is no ordinary person, and all of them show that his request for glory is valid. After all, what we despise in the people we know who seek their own glory is that they are not glorious! The word glory means “to have splendid greatness.” Your dinner-party friends, your favorite football players or the latest cult personalities are NOT splendidly great. They are ordinary people who are filled with pride, insecurity, fear, foolishness, and selfishness. Today we’ll see that Jesus stands alone and that he truly does deserve all glory, honor, and praise.
Who is Jesus? The text tells us.
1. The Son of God – “Father…” (v.1)
Jesus begins his prayer the way he always prayed—by calling God his Father. Perhaps this is not surprising to you if you’re familiar with the biblical story or if you’ve ever heard somebody else pray. It’s not at all uncommon to us to hear people praying to God as “Father,” but to the people of Jesus’ day, this was absolutely revolutionary.
In our culture when we’re getting to know somebody we ask questions like “What do you do?” or “Where are you from?” But in Jesus’ day, and still today in some eastern cultures, the question is “Who is your father?” It’s a question of identity. In those cultures, people who had a respectable father were considered respectable themselves. Those who had ordinary fathers were considered ordinary. This is why when Jesus is doing miracles and teaching in his hometown of Nazareth, some of the people can hardly believe it and they say, “isn’t this the carpenter’s son?”
For Jesus to call God his Father was an absolutely new and different and controversial thing. It was claiming equality with God. John tells us this earlier in his gospel after Jesus heals a man on the Sabbath. John writes “This is why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God” (Jn 5:18).
Jesus is no ordinary religious leader. He was the Son of God. This point is made over and over again in John’s gospel. In John 8:58, Jesus says “Before Abraham was, I am” and the Jews picked up stones to throw at him. In John 10:30, Jesus says “I and the Father are One” and the Jews picked up stones to stone him. They got the message. Jesus was claiming to be God.
There’s a common myth today that Jesus was a good religious teacher but that he never claimed to be God. It’s simply not true. The point of these verses is that he did claim to be God. The point of John’s gospel is to get us to believe this. He wrote his gospel “so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” (John 20:31)
2. The Suffering Servant – “the hour has come” (v.1)
Jesus Christ came into the world to die. When his birth was foretold by the angels, they told Joseph to name the baby “Jesus…for he will save his people from their sins.” As a result, Jesus lived his life in constant anticipation of the moment that he would go to the cross for the sins of his people. Throughout his life, he referred to this moment as his “hour” or “time.” A number of times in John’s gospel it says that Jesus “hour had not yet come” (Jn 2:4, 7:30, 8:20).
So here Jesus acknowledges that “the hour has come.” He knows that soon he will have to die as a substitute for the sins of every person who would someday trust in him. The gravity and weight of this is almost overwhelming.
All of this suffering was foretold centuries before by the prophet Isaiah, who prophesied about a “Suffering Servant.” He wrote:
He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. (Isaiah 53:3-6)
Jesus did not come merely to be a good example of how to live a better life. He came to be crushed for our sins. He came to suffer and die. This is no ordinary man. This is no crazy cult leader who is making other people suffer so that he can live a life of luxury and ease. No, this is the Son of God himself, innocent and righteous, taking the place of sinners like you and me.
3. The King of Kings – “authority over all flesh” (v.2)
The suffering of Jesus is even more amazing when you consider what he says in verse 2: “you have given him authority over all flesh.” The Bible describes Jesus not only as a suffering servant, but as the King of Kings and Lord of lords.
Throughout his ministry, the disciples saw glimpses of this authority. They saw Jesus heal a man born blind, cleanse a man with leprosy, walk on water, feed over five thousand people with just a handful of loaves and fish, and raise a man from the dead. They marveled that he didn’t care about what people thought of him and that he had such incredible wisdom.
Though Jesus’ full deity was veiled throughout his life on earth, there were moments when it broke through. All these were to be just glimpses of who Jesus really is. He is the one who will someday judge all men and all authority has been given to him. Therefore, his request for glory is absolutely right.
4. The Life-Giver – “to give eternal life” (v.2)
The fourth thing we learn about Jesus is perhaps one of the most important things and has incredible implications for us personally. We see that Jesus’ authority was to be used in a particular way—to give eternal life to all of the people God had given him.
Eternal life is John’s favorite phrase for describing salvation. While the other gospel writers often speak about the “kingdom of God” and the Apostle Paul often speaks of “justification by faith,” John constantly refers to salvation as eternal life. The phrase occurs 17 times in John’s gospel and 6 times in his other writings.
And here, in this passage, we see a definition of eternal life: to know the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent. Eternal life is not primarily about a place or an activity, but about a person. Those who will have true life that never ends are those who are connected in a relational way to the God who is self-existent and will never end. The word “know” implies the idea of personal, experiential knowledge or relationship. In other words, this isn’t just a head-knowledge knowing but personal knowing.
Jesus taught that he had come to bring life and to bring it abundantly (to the full). This is the kind of life he brought. Through Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, we have access to God. We can know him. He no longer has to be a distant judge that we are afraid of, but a loving Father who knows our every need and delights in us knowing him.
You’ve had moments with your family or friends, maybe even just a few, where you’ve thought to yourself, “This is life!” Earlier this summer, Molly and I went to Orlando for a weeklong conference and it was our first time in two years away from our daughter Abby for more than 24 hours. We spent the mornings at the conference and then the afternoons driving around, visiting, and just hanging out. We didn’t do anything in particular. But being together was so sweet and so rich that it was a taste of true life. We were experiencing our oneness and our friendship in a way that was absolutely life-giving. Well, if that’s what it feels like to be in relationship with my wife, how much more invigorating is it to be in relationship with the one who made her?
This is what Jesus came to do—give eternal life. Knowing God is a gift. It happens through Jesus and what he has accomplished on the cross. It’s not something that’s earned or achieved. It’s received.
5. The Second Adam – “having accomplished the work that you gave me to do” (v.4)
Jesus perfectly obeyed his Father’s will. Though he was intensely tempted, he never sinned. He never disobeyed. He was constantly focused on obeying his Father:
· Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work. (John 4:34)
· “I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me. (John 5:30)
· For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. (John 6:38)
This is hugely important. In order for Jesus to be the Savior of his people, it was important that he himself was blameless.
I love my daughter Abby. I would gladly sacrifice my life for her if it meant that she could know and love God. But God would not accept my sacrifice for her sins because I have my own to deal with.
But Jesus did not sin. In living a life of perfect obedience, Jesus is the Second Adam. As the first human being, Adam was a representative of all who would follow after him. Thus, when he sinned, his sin was credited to us and we inherited his sin nature. As a result, sin and death have spread to all people and nobody is exempt.
But Jesus is the second Adam, born of a virgin so that he would not have Adam’s sinful nature. Like Adam, he is tempted to disobey and distrust God. For forty days and nights he is in the wilderness being tempted by Satan. But unlike Adam, Jesus never gives into that temptation. Instead he lives a life of love, holiness, kindness, courage, and grace. He is the perfect man who acts as a representative to all who would follow after him. Romans 5:19 says, “For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.”
Jesus passed the test and never failed. He is worthy of our praise.
6. The Eternal One – “the glory that I had with you before the world existed” (v.5)
The final thing we learn about Jesus is something that by now should be absolutely obvious. Jesus is no ordinary man. He is not just a good moral teacher. He is God.
And in case his previous statements were a bit too cryptic for you or hard to understand, he makes it very clear in verse 5: “glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.”
Before anything in all the world began to exist, Jesus was with the Father full of glorious splendor. This is what he longs for. This is what he can’t wait to return to. And this is what Jesus has lost in order to be the Savior of the world.
What makes him different from every other person who wants glory is that 1) he is actually deserving of it and 2) he gets it through giving it away.
Philippians 2:6-11 says that Jesus “was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
This is who Jesus is: the Son of God, Suffering Servant, the King of kings, the Giver of Life, the Second Adam and the Eternal One. He is worthy of our worship and our adoration and our praise. On the cross, he gave up his relationship with his Father so that we could be brought in. He died as a substitute in our place so that we could know God. He is worthy of glorious splendor.