Jesus...said: ...·‘The principal leader of this world is coming. Yet he does not have one thing on me. ·On the contrary, I am acting this way according to how the Father has directed me, so that the world may know this, and that I love the Father. Get up now. Let us go… ·The hour is coming and has now come in which YOU will be scattered—towards each one's own people and things, with me left alone. Yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me. ·All these things I have spoken to YOU so that in me YOU may have peace. In the world YOU will have pressure but be courageous; I have overcome the world.’ (John 14:23a,30b-31; 16:32-33 GH[i])

While saying these things, Jesus lifted up his eyes towards heaven and said: ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son: so that the Son may glorify you; ·so that he might give eternal life to every one of those you have given to him, just as you have given to him authority over all flesh. ·And eternal life is this: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus the Messiah whom you have sent. ·I have glorified you on earth; I have finished the work that you gave me to do. ·Now, Father, glorify me alongside yourself with the glory that I had alongside you before the world existed. ·I have made your name visible to the people you gave me out of the world. They were yours and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. ·Now they know that all things, whatever you have given me, are from alongside you; ·that the words you gave to me I have given to them. These they also received, and they know for sure that I came from alongside you; and they believe that you sent me. ·I pray for them; I am not praying for the world but for those whom you have given me, because they are yours... ·I sanctify myself for their sakes so that they too may be sanctified in truth. (Jn.17:1-9)

‘I am…praying…also for those who will believe in me through their word… ·…That the world may believe that you sent me, ·…I have given them the glory which you have given me, so that they may be one as we are one— ·I in them and you in me—that they may be made mature in unity, so that the world may know that you have sent me, and that you have loved them just as you have loved me. ·What you have given me, Father, I want for these also: to be with me where I am so that they may see the glory that is mine, which you have given me because you have loved me before the foundation of the world. ·Father, Righteous One, that same world has not known you; yet I have known you and these have known that you have sent me. ·Also, I have made your name known to them—and will continue to do so—so that the love with which you loved me may be in them, and I may be in them.’ Having said all these things, Jesus came out of the city with his disciples, across the Wadi Kedron. (Jn.17:20-26; 18:1a)

As Jesus leaves the upper room with his disciples, he warns them of the suffering he is about to undergo. And they too, he says, will experience such ‘pressure’ in this world. Then, before entering the Garden of Gethsemene, Jesus prays to his Father: ‘Father, glorify your Son, so that the Son will glorify you’. What was Jesus requesting? Was it unique to this situation? And is this only a prayer that Jesus can pray?

I grew up in two worlds: a rapidly secularizing world and the Christian world of my family and my church. But I only heard the words ‘glory’ and ‘glorify’ in my Christian world. So I grew up associating ‘glory’ with the splendor that surrounded God in heaven. Yet Jesus asks his Father to ‘glorify’ him with heavenly ‘glory’ so that he can ‘glorify’ his Father here on earth during the time of intense suffering that will culminate in experiencing death. He is ‘sanctifying’ himself for the final work of accomplishing our salvation. But from his prayer we can infer that he has probably prayed this prayer before. As his prayer continues, he speaks of having ‘glorified’ his Father by completing the work given him to do during the preceding three years. And to do that he had received ‘glory’ from the Father to pass on to his disciples through his teaching, and through the demonstrations of the ‘authority’ he had been given for his earthly ministry.

Because of my religious understanding of ‘glory’, I thought I would only receive it when I got to heaven. So until I arrived ‘in glory’, my responsibility here on earth was to make sure God always ‘got the glory’, not me. And my chief responsibility, according to the Westminster Shorter Catechism, was to seek ‘to glorify God’ as best I could. Yet Jesus prays this prayer in the hearing of his disciples because they too are going to face pressure in the world (suffering). So maybe he was modeling a prayer for them to pray too, especially under difficult circumstances and in a time of terminal suffering. They had already received the Father’s glory by receiving Jesus' words—which came from the Father. But there is another dimension to the Father’s glory that Jesus is requesting, and that he wants his disciples to see: the Father’s eternal love... in them (17:26)!

Jesus knows he is loved. He has known this love from the beginning and is confident that his Father will never desert him (Med.#41). But love is not an intellectual idea that you only need to hear about once. What wife is satisfied with a husband who says: I told you I loved you when I married you; why do I have to keep saying it? Can a child remain confident in the love of a father who can never be approached for reaffirmation of that love? Love involves an ongoing relationship in which a person need never fear asking for more. So as Jesus faces his hour of suffering in a body just like ours, he is not ashamed to ask his Father for more of his glorious loving presence. He prays for this so he can demonstrate to the world even more how much he loves the Father in return. It is the glory of this relationship that Jesus wants his disciples to see: not just the Father’s love for Jesus, but also the Father’s love for them. Eternal life is about knowing the Father, not just knowing Jesus. And this means knowing that the Father loves us as sons and daughters ‘just as’ he loves Jesus!

The disciples, however, will only fully get this when the Holy Spirit comes and he and the Father come to live in them (Med.#57). How about you? Can you now see that your Creator is also your true Father, and that he loves you ‘just as’ (in the same way, as much as) he loves Jesus? When children grow up basking in the warm presence of their parents' constant, unconditional love, they become confident adult sons and daughters—able to face most of the pressures that the world throws at them. But in this fallen and broken world, many children have never seen their father's eyes light up every time they enter the room. As a result, they experience self-doubt and low self-esteem when facing difficult situations in their adult lives. Jesus came to redeem us and to restore in us a confident sense of ‘glory’, or significance, in our Father's presence. As we contemplate Jesus, with the help of the Scriptures and the Holy Spirit, we can recognize in his face the light of our Father's love directed towards us—a light that warms our hearts and make us shine with a confident sense of significance—with ‘ever-increasing glory’, so we too can face any kind of suffering (Med.#32), and any kind of temptation (Med.#53).[ii]

Finally, the glory of the Father's love that we receive through Jesus is for the whole family—a sense of belonging that produces family unity. One of the most important ways we glorify the Father, after receiving the glory of his love, is by passing on his love to our brothers and sisters in Christ. This is what Jesus did—even to the ones who were about to desert him during his sufferings. Do we do the same? When we look at our brothers and sisters who often fail us, can we still see them as co-heirs and loved by our Father just as much as he loves us? According to Jesus, this is how we need to live if the rest of the people in this world are ever going to get the revelation that Jesus came for them, and that the Father loves them too?

In the next meditation, we will look at several more aspects of Jesus’ prayer to his Father in John 17.