To You Who Are Beloved of our Lord Jesus Christ,
Our Scripture for this week is John 17:
After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and
said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify
you, 2 since you have given him authority over all
people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. 3 And
this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus
Christ, whom you have sent. 4 I glorified you on
earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. 5 So
now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your
presence before the world existed.
6 “I have made your name
known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave
them to me, and they have kept your word. 7 Now
they know that everything you have given me is from you, 8 for
the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them
and know in truth that I came from you, and they have believed that you sent
me. 9 I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking
on behalf of the world but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they
are yours. 10 All mine are yours, and yours are
mine, and I have been glorified in them. 11 And now
I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you.
Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may
be one, as we are one. 12 While I was with them, I
protected them in your name that you have given me. I guarded them, and
not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost, so that the
scripture might be fulfilled. 13 But now I am
coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my
joy made complete in themselves. 14 I have given
them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the
world, just as I do not belong to the world. 15 I
am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them
from the evil one. 16 They do not belong to the
world, just as I do not belong to the world. 17 Sanctify
them in the truth; your word is truth. 18 As you
have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. 19 And
for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in
truth.
20 “I ask not only on behalf
of these but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their
word, 21 that they may all be one. As you, Father,
are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may
believe that you have sent me. 22 The glory that
you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are
one, 23 I in them and you in me, that they may
become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and
have loved them even as you have loved me. 24 Father,
I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to
see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the
foundation of the world.
25 “Righteous Father, the
world does not know you, but I know you, and these know that you have sent
me. 26 I made your name known to them, and I will
make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them and
I in them.”
This prayer is
shared by Jesus just before His arrest. In
each gospel, before Jesus’ arrest, before the events of Good Friday begin to
unfold, Jesus prays. But the prayer in
the Gospel of John, our reading today, is far different from the prayerful
sentiments Jesus expresses in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
In our attempts
to understand just who the unique figure of Jesus Christ is in our life and
history, we have come up with descriptions like “fully human and fully
God”. What does that actually mean? I believe it means that we are not able so
much to define Jesus as to describe how He is presented to us.
So, in the
first three gospels, the Synoptic gospels (all following more or less the same
outline), Jesus is broken and on His knees in the Garden of Gethsemane. It is the human being attempting to bear up
under the weight of divine punishment for all of us. It drives Him to His knees. Jesus asks if this weight, if this coming
death can be passed from His hands. This
is the prayer that we associate with our Tenebrae services during Holy Week.
In our Gospel
reading today, it is also Jesus, but it is written from the Godly side of Jesus.
It begins with
“Father, the hour has come…” But then we
do not enter the anguish of Jesus, but the accomplishment. Yes, Jesus is about to die, horribly. But it is to achieve something larger, it is
to achieve God’s plan. Jesus will be
glorified, He will be raised again. That
is the piece that we see in this prayer in John’s Gospel.
But then Jesus
elaborates. In prayer, He takes us
through the Holy History of what He has done in His ministry. But it is not about Him. His time is coming to a conclusion, He is
passing the baton to the next generation, to the disciples whom He has
called. It is a prayer for them, to
carry on the work.
Jesus
identifies their work with His own. It
is here where Jesus speaks of them being ‘in the world’ but not ‘of the
world’. That they will need
protection. That they were granted to
Jesus by God in heaven. That they will
continue to do what Jesus was doing. As
workers in Jesus’ Name, the call of our Savior is not to remove them from the
world, but to protect them from the Evil One who runs rampant in the world.
Now, doubters
of the Bible will look at these passages and then at us and tell us that the
Word of God has a contradiction in it.
We have the tired and terrified Jesus on the one hand and the chill and
confident Jesus on the other. It’s like
we are being challenged to pick one over the other.
I would like to
suggest another possibility. The gospels
are written for us. God inspired them to
speak to us. God chose writers who stand
as unique witnesses to the plan and history of Christ. I do not believe they even understood they
were writing ‘bible’. God brought them
together, maybe especially for moments like these final hours of Jesus’ life.
For example,
the first three gospels include for us the Last Supper, and Jesus’ call and
command that we do this in remembrance of Him (as we will this Sunday). John does not include that, but assumes it, leading
in with the story of Jesus washing the feet of the disciples. Are they mutually exclusive? Certainly not. They are of the same story,
each told to illustrate God’s point. Because
each Gospel was inspired by God for us.
So, perhaps a
way to read this is to begin in John 14, where Jesus begins to speak of what is
next, what is coming, “In my Father’s House there are many dwelling places…and
I go and prepare a place for you…and I will come back…” through this prayer in
John 17, where Jesus speaks to His Father, asking for the blessings and
protection of God upon His disciples.
Then, to begin
chapter 18 in John, ‘after Jesus had spoken these words, He went out with His
disciples across the Kidron valley to a place where there was a garden…”
If we were to
pick up the account in Luke, Luke 22: 39-46, it is Luke’s account of Jesus’
prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, perhaps the most intense of the first three
gospels. As in verse 44, “in his anguish
he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood
falling down on the ground.” Other
translations do not assume this is a simile, but that Jesus’ pain was so great,
it was physically manifest. And in verse
43, that God sent an angel to give Jesus strength.
To begin in
bold prayer in the power of God in John to the deeply personal prayers of a man
in anguish in Luke, we are given by our Lord a masterclass of what it means to
“bring it to the Lord in prayer”. May we
aspire to pray so freely and completely to our God in Heaven.
Pastor Pete
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