John 17

The prayer opens with a gesture and a single, weighty word. These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour is come (v. 1). All through this Gospel the hour has hung in the distance like a fixed appointment. Early on it was always being deferred - mine hour is not yet come - and now, the night of His betrayal, with the cross only hours away, Jesus says simply: it has arrived. He does not name it with dread. He lifts His eyes and speaks of it as the moment everything has moved toward. And His first request concerning that hour is not for relief but for glory - and notice how the glory runs in two directions at once. Glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee. He asks the Father to honor Him precisely so that He may honor the Father; the two are bound together in a single motion. What the world will see as a man condemned, the prayer calls a mutual glorifying - the Father lifting up the Son, the Son lifting up the Father, in the very thing about to unfold.³

Jesus describes the authority He has been given and what He does with it: As thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him (v. 2). Two things stand out. First, the power is given - it comes from the Father, an authority over all flesh, over every human life. Second, and remarkably, that vast authority is exercised not to dominate but to give: its whole purpose is that he should give eternal life. Here is power bent entirely toward gift. And He speaks tenderly of those who receive it as a people handed to Him by the Father - as many as thou hast given him. The phrase will return again and again through the prayer; the disciples, and all who follow, are spoken of as the Father's gift to the Son. To belong to Christ, this prayer quietly says, is to have been given - placed into His care by the Father Himself.

Then comes one of the most important sentences in the whole Gospel, a definition offered in the middle of a prayer: And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent (v. 3). Notice what eternal life is said to be. Not first a length of time, not a place reached after death, but a knowing - a knowing of God. Jesus prays to the Father as the only true God, and in the same breath names Himself as the one the Father hast sent, and says that eternal life is the knowledge of both together. The word for “know” here is not the cool knowing of facts about a stranger; it is the deep, personal knowing of someone you are bound to. Eternal life, on Jesus' own definition, is relational before it is anything else - to know the Father, and to know the Son He sent. A person can hold much information about God and not have this. And a person who truly knows God in this living sense has already, the verse says, begun to possess the life that does not end.

Now Jesus speaks of His work as already complete, though the cross still lies ahead: I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do (v. 4). He looks back over the whole of His ministry - every word spoken, every sign given, every act of obedience - and sums it up as a commission carried out. The work was the Father's assignment (which thou gavest me to do), and it is done. There is no loose end, no unfinished obedience. And then He asks for something we should weigh carefully: And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was (v. 5). He does not ask to be given a glory He never had; He asks to be restored to a glory that was already His - a glory He shared with the Father before the world was. The request looks back behind creation itself. The One praying speaks of having been with the Father in glory before anything existed, and asks now to be brought home to it. The verse states this plainly and leaves it standing in its own light.

Jesus turns now from His own glory to the men gathered around Him, and the way He speaks of them is tender and exact. I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world: thine they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have kept thy word (v. 6). Three movements are pressed into one sentence. They were the Father's to begin with - thine they were. The Father gave them to the Son - thou gavest them me. And the Son made the Father known to them - I have manifested thy name. To manifest the Father's name is to make the Father Himself known, His character and nature laid open; Jesus has shown them who God is. And the result is quietly stated: they have kept thy word. These are not perfect men - one will deny Him before morning, all will scatter - yet Jesus can say they have held on to the word given them. He sees them not at their worst moment but along their whole trajectory, and He speaks of them with gratitude, as a gift He received from the Father's hand.

Jesus describes what has actually happened in these men: For I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me (vv. 7-8). Trace the chain. The Father gave words to the Son; the Son gave those same words to the disciples; the disciples received them. And receiving them, they came to two convictions - that Jesus came out from the Father, and that the Father didst send Him. This is the bedrock of faith as this Gospel describes it: to know surely where Jesus came from and that He was sent. It is not a vague religious feeling; it is a settled recognition of who He is and from whom He comes. And notice that it came through words - through the message faithfully handed down from the Father, through the Son, to them. Faith here is not self-generated; it is the response of a heart that has received what was given and held on to it.

Now the prayer becomes explicit about its scope: I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me; for they are thine (v. 9). This is not coldness toward the world - this is the same Jesus of whom it was said, God so loved the world, and who will pray a few breaths later that the world may believe. The point is narrower and tender: in this moment He is interceding specifically for His own, lifting up by name the people entrusted to Him. And the reason He gives is striking: for they are thine. He prays for them not because they have earned it but because they belong to the Father. Then comes a line of deep mutuality: And all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified in them (v. 10). Everything the Son has is the Father's, and everything the Father has is the Son's - a complete sharing - and these ordinary disciples are caught up inside it. More than that: I am glorified in them. The Son's glory is somehow displayed in this little company of fishermen and former tax collectors. They are not merely the objects of His prayer; they are the place where His glory will be seen.

Then Jesus names the situation that makes His prayer so urgent: And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee (v. 11). He is leaving; they are staying. He goes to the Father; they remain in a world that, He will say, has hated them. And so He prays the petition that He will return to again and again: Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are. Two things stand together here. First, He asks the Father to keep them - to guard, hold, watch over - and to do so through thine own name, by the very power and presence of who God is. The disciples' security does not rest on their own strength but on the Father's keeping. Second, the goal of that keeping is oneness: that they may be one, as we are. Here for the first time the prayer's deepest petition surfaces, and it is anchored to the highest possible pattern - the disciples are to be one in the way the Father and the Son are one. Their unity is not to be a mere agreement or alliance; it is to be patterned on the union at the very heart of God.

Jesus reports on the keeping He has already done, and it is a moving line: While I was with them in the world, I kept them in thy name: those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition; that the scripture might be fulfilled (v. 12). All the time He was with them, He guarded them - and of those the Father gave, He says, none of them is lost. The one exception, the son of perdition, is Judas, whose betrayal the Scriptures had foreseen; even that dark turn does not catch God by surprise. The keeping has been faithful and complete. And now, as He prepares to go, the keeping is handed back to the Father (v. 11) - the same guarding work continuing, now from heaven. Then He tells why He prays aloud where they can hear: these things I speak in the world, that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves (v. 13). The prayer is, in part, a gift to the listeners - spoken openly so that His own joy might overflow into them and become theirs. Even on the night of betrayal, He is thinking of their joy.

Jesus is honest about what following Him will cost: I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world (v. 14). The disciples no longer belong to the world's way of being - they are marked out as His - and that very difference draws hostility. And then comes one of the most important lines for understanding the whole Christian life: I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil (v. 15). Notice carefully what Jesus does not ask. He does not pray for escape, for withdrawal, for a safe removal from a hard and hostile world. He prays instead that they be kept within it - guarded from the evil while they remain right in the thick of things. This is the shape of discipleship: not retreat from the world but protection inside it. And He gives the reason in the next breath: As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world (v. 18). They are left in the world because they are sent into it, as He was sent. To be taken out would be to abandon the mission.

At the heart of His prayer for the disciples stands a single petition about holiness: Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth (v. 17). To sanctify is to set apart, to make holy, to consecrate for God's own use - and Jesus names the means by which it happens: through thy truth. Then He defines that truth with startling simplicity: thy word is truth. The disciples are not made holy by their own effort or by retreat from the world, but by the word of God working in them - the truth shaping, purifying, and consecrating them as it takes hold. And then He says something that reaches all the way to the cross: And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth (v. 19). Jesus sets Himself apart - consecrates Himself wholly to the Father's purpose, the offering He is about to make - and He does it for their sakes, so that they might be made holy too. His self-consecration becomes the source of theirs. The holiness He prays for them is purchased by His own complete devotion, sealed in the hour now at hand.

Now the prayer breaks open to its widest circle. Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word (v. 20). Jesus lifts His eyes past the eleven men in front of Him and prays for people not yet born - everyone who will ever come to faith down all the centuries. And He names exactly how they will come: through their word. Faith will spread from this little company outward, as the disciples bear witness and others believe their testimony, and those believers tell still others, on and on. Every Christian who has ever lived is folded into this sentence. The faith you hold reached you because someone passed on the word that began with these men - and the night before He died, Jesus was already praying for you by that very trajectory. You were not outside His thoughts in the upper room; you were inside His prayer, named not by your name but by the path that would one day bring His word to you.

And what does Jesus ask for all these future believers? The petition that has been rising through the whole prayer, now stated in full: That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me (v. 21). Hold the layers of this together. The oneness He prays for is patterned on the union of the Father and the Son - as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee. That mutual indwelling, the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father, is the model and the source of the unity His people are to have. And believers are drawn into that very communion: that they also may be one in us. Their oneness is not first an organizational arrangement or a forced agreement; it flows from being joined to the Father and the Son and so to one another. Then comes the purpose, and it is missional: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. The unity of Christ's people is meant to be visible - a sign held up before the watching world, evidence that Jesus truly came from God. How His people hold together is meant to make the world believe.

Jesus says something almost startling about what He has done with His glory: And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one (v. 22). The glory the Father gave the Son, the Son has given to His people - and the purpose, again, is oneness. This is not the glory of being honored or served; in this prayer glory has been bound up with self-giving, with the cross, with making the Father known. That is the glory shared with the disciples, and it knits them together. Then He describes the union in its fullest terms: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me (v. 23). The picture is one of indwelling reaching all the way through - the Father in the Son, the Son in the believers - until they are made perfect in one, brought to a complete and mature unity. And note the final clause, almost too much to take in: the world is meant to know not only that the Father sent the Son, but that the Father has loved them - ordinary believers - with the very love He has for the Son. As thou hast loved me. The same love.

The prayer rises now to its longing: Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me: for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world (v. 24). Notice the strength of the words - not merely “I ask” but I will. This is the deep desire of the Son's heart for His own: that they would be with me where I am. The destination of the Christian life is here stated as a Person and a place - to be where He is, in His presence, gazing on His glory. And the glory He wants them to behold is the glory He spoke of at the start of the prayer (v. 5), now grounded in a love that reaches back before time: thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world. The Father's love for the Son did not begin in Bethlehem or at the Jordan; it was already there before anything was made. And that everlasting love is the spring from which everything in this prayer flows. The Son who was loved before the foundation of the world prays that those given to Him would one day stand with Him and see that glory for themselves.

The prayer closes as it opened, addressed to the Father, and it ends on the one word everything has been moving toward: love. O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee: but I have known thee, and these have known that thou hast sent me (v. 25). The world at large has not known the Father - but the Son has always known Him, and this little company has come to know that the Son was sent. They stand, by grace, on the right side of that great divide. And then the final petition, the summit of the whole prayer: And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them (v. 26). Jesus has made the Father known - and He is not finished; He will declare it still. And to what end? That the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them. The very love the Father has for the Son - that eternal love from before the world was - Jesus asks to be placed in His people. Not a lesser love, not a distant echo of it, but that same love dwelling in them. And with it, Himself: and I in them. The prayer ends with the Son indwelling His own, carrying into them the love that has been from eternity.