The Greatest Prayer

April 5 The Greatest Prayer John 17:1-26

“He again places the end of our happiness in unity, and justly. For the ruin of the human race is that, alienated from God, it is also broken and scattered in itself. Conversely, therefore, its restoration lies in its proper coalescence in one body, the perfection of the Church being joined together in one Spirit.” John Calvin “Commentary on John” Vol. 5:147-148

The seventeenth chapter of John’s Gospel is sometimes called Jesus’ “high priestly prayer.” The title is a little misleading, in that Jesus did not achieve priestly office until He ascended to be with His Father, there to intercede for us. Nevertheless, it is probably the greatest and most-loved prayer in the Scriptures. In it, Jesus re-emphasizes His need to glorify the Father through His obedience, and through the preparation of the disciples. He would not be with them for much longer, and so He prayed for them, and for us. Some commentators imagine Jesus praying as He made His way to the Mount of Olives, to Gethsemane. These were among Jesus’ final words before His arrest.

Jesus had spent His entire earthly ministry striving to bring glory to the Father. In His prayer, Jesus asked that He might share in that glory. He was thinking about the Cross. He knew full well that His death was to be the means of His triumph, but He also knew what He would have to endure. To share in the glory of God was to overcome the terrors of the grave and to draw sinners to Himself. This, then, was a prayer of exaltation. Jesus saw the time, rapidly approaching, when He would no longer be rejected as a victim, but hailed as the victor. His arms, outstretched upon the Cross, radiant with the glory of the Father, would be a symbol not of agony but of welcome.

Jesus continued by praying for His disciples. He had been their Good Shepherd; He did not want to leave them to fend for themselves against ravenous wolves. So He prayed for them. He asked for their continued unity in Him and in the Father. He did not ask that they be taken out of the world, only that they be kept safe from the evil one. And He prayed for their remarkable mission, that they should be empowered from on high to take up the works of the Son. Jesus had glorified the Father through His obedience; now the disciples would have their opportunity to give God the glory as they reached out with the Gospel of Christ.

Finally, Jesus prayed for disciples yet to be born, those who would believe because of the message passed on by the first believers. Second generation Christians must have read these words and been encouraged. So should we; these words have not lost their power. Again, He prayed for unity in the truth, not a political unity that fails to recognize cultural differences, but the unity that prevails when believers stand united on the fundamentals of the faith. Jesus also prayed that, one day, all believers might be with Him, beyond the veil of death, to see His glory and to delight in His presence.

We, too, should be amazed that, on the night before He was taken away to be crucified, Jesus looked down the centuries and saw us. More than that, He prayed for us, that we might find unity in the truth, that we might be ardent in passing on that truth to others, and that we might know the blessed hope of eternal life with Him. In humility, we must admit that we do not know everything that there is to know about this Jesus; but at the same time we must not hesitate to say that we do know Him, and that we look forward to the day when we shall know Him fully, even as we are fully known.

For further reading: Psalm 39