“The Lord’s Prayer”
John 17:1-11
5/4/08
Today’s Gospel text may rightly be entitled
“The Lord’s Prayer.” Unlike the prayer that our
Lord teaches us to pray, which we call the Lord’s Prayer, this
prayer actually is our Lord’s own prayer which He Himself prays
to His Father. When you think about it, it’s an amazing
gift that we are given to listen in on these words that God the Son
speaks to God the Father. By nature any communication that the
Persons of the Trinity might have with each other would be utterly
incomprehensible to us, His creatures. But here Jesus speaks with
simple human words, so that we might know what is in His heart and hear
what His will is both for Himself and for us, His disciples.
What I’d like to do, then, is go with you
through the eleven verses of this prayer that we are given to focus on
today, in order to gain insight and understanding into what our Lord
prays for from His Father, so that we might know not only what His will
is, but also that His Father hears His Son’s prayer and answers
Him, giving His Son everything that He asks for.
So, if you’d like to follow along on the back
of your bulletin, we’ll begin with the words of the Apostle John
who writes, “When Jesus had spoken these words, He lifted up His
eyes to heaven and said...” The “these words”
John is referring to here are the words which Jesus had just finished
speaking to His disciples on the night when He was betrayed. His
words had to do with His crucifixion and resurrection, His going back
to the Father, and His sending the Holy Spirit. He also spoke
many words of comfort to His disciples, as well as words of instruction
about abiding in Him, keeping His Word, and loving one another.
John writes that after He had spoken these words, Jesus lifted up His
eyes to heaven and began His prayer. The significance of lifting
one’s eyes up to heaven is not that God is located somewhere out
there in space, billions of miles away from us, but that He is above us
in a spiritual sense. It reminds us that we are under and subject
to Him. And Jesus, too, in His state of humiliation, had put
Himself under the Father. Lifting His eyes to heaven, Jesus
showed the proper attitude one is to have in prayer - that of humility,
recognizing one’s place before God, but it also showed the
posture of a Son looking to and expecting from His loving Father the
things for which He asks.
He begins His prayer with the petition,
“Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may
glorify you...” Jesus addressed God as His Father. No
one had ever addressed God in this way before. Jesus could and
did, because He is God’s only-begotten Son. But He also
gives this Name for us to use as well, who are God’s sons by
faith in Jesus. With this Name God wants us to know that
“He truly is our Father and that we truly are His children, so
that we may, with all boldness and confidence, ask Him as dear children
ask their dear father.” The hour that had come for Jesus
was the hour that He was to go to the cross. There the work that
the Father had sent Him to do would be finished. There the Father
would glorify Himself through His Son. For God to glorify Himself
is for Him to reveal Himself to us - His will, His ways, and His
attitude towards us. He does this through His words and His
works, which are most clearly seen through the words and works of His
Son, crucified and risen from the dead for our salvation. And so
the Son is glorified when His words and works are praised. And
when the Son is glorified, the Father who sent Him is also glorified.
Jesus asks that both He and the Father be glorified,
since the Father had given Jesus authority over all flesh, to give
eternal life to all whom the Father had given Him. We often think
of authority in terms of naked power or force, as in, “The police
have the authority to arrest you.” Police officers have
been given the “can do” to enforce the law. But here
the specific “can do” that the Father has given the Son is
the authority to give eternal life to all whom the Father has given
Him. Though His authority extends over all flesh, though Christ
has died for the sins of the whole world and though the forgiveness of
sins for His sake is proclaimed to all nations, most people will reject
this proclamation. This authority of Jesus can be resisted.
It is only received by those whom the Father has given to the Son,
those who were born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of
the will of man but of God. You who believe in Jesus and have
been baptized into the Name of God are the Father’s gift to His
Son, and the glory for this work goes to God through Jesus Christ, not
to you.
Next Jesus says, “And this is eternal life,
that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have
sent.” Expressed negatively, not to know God and His Son
whom He has sent is not to have life; it is to be dead. God is
the author of life; He’s the maker of the heavens and the earth,
the maker of you and me. When He created Adam in the beginning,
He breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and man became a
living being. But God warned Adam and Eve that they could lose
their life by disobeying Him and eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of
Good and Evil. God had told them that in the day they ate of it
they’d surely die. The devil tricked them into believing
that God was lying to them, that they wouldn’t die, and so they
ate of the fruit. Well, they didn’t die physically right
away, but at that very moment they died spiritually. And
that’s the way we all come into this world now, spiritually dead,
separated from God who is our life. And if we were to die
physically while in this condition, we would suffer eternal death in
hell. But in Jesus Christ we are given to know God again, the
author of life. Jesus came that we might come to know the Father
through His words and His works, especially His work on the
cross. Now, through faith in Jesus we know the Father (or better,
we’re known by Him) and we have eternal life right now with the
hope of the resurrection of our bodies and the life of the world to
come to look forward to. It’s only through Jesus that we
can know the Father and have this eternal life. Apart from Jesus
there is no knowledge of the Father, and therefore no life.
Jesus then says to His Father, “I glorified
you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to
do.” Everything Jesus did He did as the Father had given
Him to do. That work was specifically to do all that was
necessary to achieve our salvation - from His perfect obedience to His
Father’s will, to His faithful proclamation of His Father’s
words, to His bloody death on the cross, to His bodily resurrection
from the dead. All of this brought glory to the Father. And
now Jesus asks that His Father glorify Him in His own presence with the
glory that He had with His Father before the world existed. Here,
Jesus is praying that the Father exalt Him to that place at His right
hand where He was before His incarnation, to that eternal divine glory
that He had always had as God even before the creation of the
universe. According to His divine nature, Jesus always had this
glory. But now He prays that according to His human nature He
would be exalted, so that as the God-Man He might sit at the right hand
of God the Father almighty with the same glory He shared with the
Father from all eternity as God.
Next, He says, “I have manifested your Name to
the people whom you gave me out of the world. Yours they were,
and you gave them to me, and they have kept your Word.”
Again, those who believe in Jesus Christ are a gift of the Father to
His only-begotten Son. The Son manifested the Name of His Father
to us. He revealed His Father to us in Himself, His words, His
work, and our Baptism. As a result we keep God’s
Word. To keep the Word of Jesus is to keep the Word of God.
And we who keep God’s Word have the privilege of praying to God
using the Name Father with the same promise that Jesus has that God
hears us and will answer us, because we belong to Christ.
Then Jesus says, “Now they know that
everything that you have given me is from you. For I have given
them the words that you gave me, and they have received them and have
come to know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that
you sent me.” Here Jesus doesn’t praise us for
believing in Him, as if our faith were a good work on our part.
He draws our attention to the Word of God and what it does in us.
It is the result of its work in us that we are led to believe that
Jesus comes in the Name of the Father, that He was sent by the Father,
that He speaks the words of the Father, that He does the works of the
Father. In the end all the glory and praise for our having
received the Lord’s words and believed them goes to the Lord
Himself. All this has been given to us by the Father through the
Son.
Jesus continues: “I am praying for
them. I am not praying for the world but for those whom you have
given me, for they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are
mine, and I am glorified in them.” Earlier Jesus had said,
“My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow
me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no
one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given
them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out
of the Father’s hand. I and the Father are
one.” Here in His prayer for us, He reiterates in our
hearing the comforting words that we belong to Him. And to belong
to Jesus is to belong to the Father, because He has given us to His
Son. It is for those who belong to Him that Jesus prays.
And isn’t that a comfort - to know that the Lord prays for
you? How often? Consider that His thoughts towards you
outnumber the sand of the sea, according to His Word.
Then Jesus says, “And I am no longer in the
world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy
Father, keep them in your Name, which you have given me, that they may
be one, even as we are one.” Jesus is no longer in this
world visibly, locally as He was before His ascension. But since
His session at the right hand of God the Father Almighty He is present
now among us as the Holy Spirit performs His work of delivering Jesus
and His gifts to us through the Word and the Sacraments. In this
way, the Father answers Jesus’ prayer, keeping us in the Name
into which we were baptized, making us one in Christ through the
confession of His Word and the eating and drinking of His body and
blood in His Holy Supper. Though there is much division in the
visible manifestation of the Church today due to doctrinal error, there
is still only one holy Christian and apostolic Church - all who know
God through Jesus Christ His Son.
We can be sure that the Father has answered His
Son’s prayer. He glorified His Son through His earthly
ministry, glorified Him on the cross, and glorified Him at His
resurrection and ascension, seating Him at His right hand. In all
of this Jesus glorified His Father as well, revealing Him to the world,
giving us eternal life, doing the Father’s work, giving us the
Father’s words, manifesting the Father’s Name. And
the Father has also glorified His Son by conferring upon Him as the
God-Man the same glory that He had before the world was created.
And now by the work of God the Holy Spirit He keeps us in His Name, the
Name into which He has baptized us, so that we might be one as Jesus
and the Father are one. The Lord’s Prayer, then, is a
comfort to us. It assures us that the gates of hell have not nor
cannot prevail against those who belong to God. His Name is
hallowed, His kingdom comes, and His will is being done through His
crucified, risen, and ascended Son, Jesus Christ, who prays for
you. Amen.