To have John 17 is a great blessing and a deep privilege because here we get to the very heart of the relationship between the Father and his Son and, in doing so, we reach the heart and climax of Jesus’ life and ministry.
That latter point is signalled to us when Jesus says that “the time has come”, the hour to which his whole life has been steadily and unerringly moving towards. If we want to know just what Jesus was about in his life in this world, this paragraph brings it to us.
Nothing can be more important for us as Christians in understanding Jesus than comprehending his relationship with the Father and the reason for his coming into the world. And in just a few words we have it all.
1. The mutual glory of Father and Son
Jesus asks the father, with the hour in view when he will lay down his life on the cross, to glorify the Son that his Son might glorify him. In v.4 he speaks of having brought glory to the Father by finishing the work he had been given and in v.5 Jesus speaks of the glory he had with the Father before his coming into the world and his wish to return to that glory now.
In these words, Jesus shows us that there isn’t a whisker between Father and Son in their desire for each other’s glory and in the harmony that exists between them. All along they have been acting in complete agreement and with a real and mutual concern for their glory and honour.
All this is clear from the words of Jesus; it is striking and wonderful to behold. But some might ask what relevance this has to our daily lives as believers. It might be ok for books on theology but what has it got to do with us ‘on the ground’, so to speak?
In some ways, that question is rather too self-aware; any teaching about the person of God ought to be of deep interest to us, simply because of its subject. But having said that, that it has got something to do with us should be obvious from the fact that Jesus chooses to pray within the hearing of his disciples. So what should we draw from this?
A clearer understanding of the person of God, of the relationship between the members of the godhead, can only be helpful in alerting us to the nature of the Christian life. God, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is the ultimate reality and we can only rightly understand ourselves and the world if we understand him.
The Father and Son call us into the fellowship they enjoy together with the Spirit. To see their unity and joy in each other is a great delight to us. It is also our inheritance, about which we’ll say more later. To see Father and Son in such close fellowship is to savour just what we ourselves are called to know with God.
It’s also clear that Jesus aimed in all things at the glory of the Father and saw that as the gateway to himself being glorified. That stands as both call and invitation to us also, to follow the Son in glorifying the Father, in the expectation of our being glorified in him.
But the relationships within the Trinity also stand as the example and model for our relationships with each other. So this becomes very practical teaching: we ought to honour each other above ourselves, we ought to seek the best for each other, there ought to be real harmony of thought and action between us.
2. How the glory is seen
But we can and must go further in thinking about the glory of God. Jesus shows us here that the glory of both the Father and the Son is most plainly revealed in the cross and all that flows from that.
Of course the glory of God was seen in the whole life of Jesus – he was seen to be full of grace and truth – but it is in the cross that the grace of God is most clearly seen in all its wonderful contours. And it is there that the truthfulness, the faithfulness, of God is seen.
When Jesus speaks of the Father glorifying the Son, some take it to mean he is speaking of his resurrection and ascension into glory, that his death is followed by his glorification, in virtue of his having died. But what Jesus says here seems to show that he is glorified in the cross too – in v.1 he speaks of the Father glorifying him in order that he might glorify the Father. The order seems to be important.
At the cross, Jesus is glorified with the glory of self-giving love for the sake of others, a love that will heal a divided world and rescue lost sinners. There we see the heart of God & the heart of his purposes.
You might remember that Paul makes a very similar point – in Eph. 3:10,11 he speaks of God’s manifold wisdom being made known through the church to the rulers and authorities. In other words, it was to be through the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile by the cross, through the healing and reconciling love of God demonstrated at Calvary, that God’s glorious wisdom would be made known.
Our calling, too, is to glorify God. How will we do that? In what way can we most effectively point others to Jesus? By making much of the cross, of the death and resurrection of Jesus; by making much of the good news that Jesus is Lord.
But being cross-centred is not only about what we say; it is also about how we live. We cannot live sin-bearing lives but we can live under the shadow of the cross so that we bring glory to God. That means we live for the sake of others, we live for the sake of the mission of God and his desire to see all nations blessed in him.
Jesus said it is more blessed to give than to receive – we certainly are blessed in what we receive from God but that blessing is truly worked out and enjoyed to the most when we live most clearly in the shadow of the cross and follow the example of our Saviour.
3. Jesus given authority to give relationship
Jesus makes even more explicit in vv.2,3 what the display of the glory of God in his life and, supremely, in his death means for the world: he has been given authority over all flesh in order to give eternal life to all whom the Father has given to him.
The world is a broken place; all its peoples are desperately needy. We need healing; we need mercy; we need life. And Jesus has been given authority as Messiah to give that life. By virtue of his death, resurrection and ascension, he is able to freely give to all his people what we all stand in greatest need of: life in all its fullness, the life of the coming age, eternal life.
The term Jesus used speaks not only of quantity (unending life) but a whole new quality of life – life that is appropriate to God’s new world.
There are many ways in which we might conceive of that life – the absence of all that causes pain and loss; the absence of sin and the presence of the most unalloyed joy. But, for Jesus, eternal life quite simply is this: “to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (v.3).
Eternal life is knowing God. This is why Jesus came; this is the reason his life all-along moved to this hour; this is why the cross was endured and sin overcome: that we might know God. Not simply know of him or about him but to know him, truly and deeply.
This is, as we said, our inheritance – to be caught up into the very life of God, to share in the joy of the Trinity, to drink deeply of their mutual love. This is what we have been given and this is what we have to share with the world – not a system of religion, not a grand philosophy of human effort or intellectual brilliance, but the grace and truth of life lived in fellowship with God.
And that knowledge only comes through knowing Jesus as Messiah (this is why Jesus adds “and Jesus Messiah whom you have sent”). We have no way into life with God without Jesus; we are simply flesh and flesh cannot inherit the kingdom of God. But Jesus has authority over all flesh and can give eternal life to all whom the Father has given him.
What we have, we received as a gift, which means there is no place for pride and no need for insecurity. You are loved because of Jesus and invited to share in the life of God simply by his free mercy.
We sometimes speak of believers who have died as going to glory, and it’s a very apt description. But that glory is already begun here on earth as we come to know God in his Son. When our faith is in Jesus, our lives are suffused with the radiance of God’s glory – not perhaps in ways visible to us but nevertheless real and often visible to others, as they see that, though we are earthen vessels, we yet carry a treasure within us – the knowledge of God in Jesus Christ.
