Jesus Prays for Himself
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2022 · 30 January 2022
This is unique among all the portions of Scripture because it is the prayer of our Lord, to the Father. Its truths are so far-reaching, so elevated, that it’s almost impossible to extract yourself from this chapter. The words are simple enough and direct enough, but the truths are really beyond comprehension. The best we can do is touch the edges of these great realities that are in this chapter.
This is the capstone of four other chapters: John 13, 14, 15, and 16. Those chapters record the words of our Lord to His disciples the night of the Passover on Thursday night of Passion Week, the night before His crucifixion. He spent hours with His disciples. First the Passover meal, then Judas was dismissed. He instituted the Lord’s Supper at that point. And He continued to teach them.
They left the upper room. They walked through the city of Jerusalem. And as they’re walking, Jesus continues His instruction to them, full of promises, and full of warnings. He tells them that He is leaving, He will die, He will rise, and He will go back to the Father. He is promising them everything they will ever need. They will know the truth because He will send the Holy Spirit.
But all that instruction, all those promises, all that warning is now past, and John 17 is a prayer that He prays to the Father. What He prays to the Father is that the Father would bring to fulfillment all the work that He has done. This is a prayer that demonstrates the humiliation of Christ in a unique way. According to Hebrews 1, He is God who upholds the entire universe by the power of His word.
He is God who will come to reign and establish His rule in the earth, and then in the new heaven and the new earth forever. But in His incarnation sets aside His prerogatives, and submitted Himself to the Father. And so in an act of that submission, He prays that the Father will fulfill everything He has promised. As such, He gives us the most magnificent example of the need for prayer.
The Bible talks about the apostles in Acts 6:4, were given to prayer and the ministry of the Word, because we can minister the Word, and we can be faithful to the proclamation of the Word. But unless the Father activates the Word in the lives of the people who hear it, it accomplishes nothing. So we are called then to a lifetime of teaching and preaching, supported by a lifetime of prayer.
If Jesus, in His perfection, in His absolute righteousness, but in His humiliation was dependent upon the Father to fulfill His Word, we who are frail and weak and sinful, are far more dependent on the Father. So here we have a model of prayer from one who seem to us not even need to pray; but He did pray. In fact, He prayed throughout His entire life on earth. He prayed daily moment by moment.
Jesus is God always in full communion with God. At the grave of Lazarus, He prayed to the Father, and then He said, “Lazarus, come out.” At Gethsemane, He prayed to the Father and said, “If it be Your will, let this cup pass from Me.” At the cross He said, “Into Your hands I commit My spirit.” That’s about as extensive a prayer as we have, just a couple of brief verses, until we get to John 17.
And now we have this lengthy prayer in all 26 verses. Every single word comes from the lips of the Lord Jesus Christ and is part of a prayer to the Father. This chapter has been called the Holy of Holies of Scripture. It is, of course, the prayer above all prayers. But it is also the chapter above all chapters, because it alone is where we see the communion between the Son of God and the Father.
We approach the inner communion of the Trinity. The secret place of the Most High God is opened for us. Here, we need to remove our shoes and listen, and humble ourselves with reverent hearts because we are on holy ground. There is no voice which has ever been heard, more holy, more fruitful, and more sublime, than the prayer offered up by the Son of God Himself. Simple yet profound.
This prayer really marks the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry, but it also looks forward to what followed His earthly ministry, and that was His heavenly ministry which was among others the ministry of interceding for His people at the throne of God. Jesus prayed openly, and we believe that the disciples heard this prayer, and it’s recorded by the Spirit of God through the apostle John.
We have four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, to tell us what He did during those 33 years. But we have only one chapter to tell us what He’s doing now, and has been doing over the last 2,000 years, and will do until redemption is complete. Here is the one glimpse into the Christ who has been exalted and ever lives to make intercession for us. This is what Jesus is doing now.
There were also special times of prayer. At His baptism, He prayed. When He began His public ministry in Mark 1, He rose before dawn and prayed. When He was selected the twelve apostles, Luke says He went out to pray. And in prayer, He was transfigured, in Luke 9. And He died with a prayer on His lips. But again, in most cases, we have no idea what He said, until we get to John 17.
This is how He now prays in heaven. This is His mediatorial work, as the mediator between God and man. Now, His prayer is divided into three parts. The first five verses, Jesus prays for Himself. And then starting in verse 6, He prays for the apostles that are with Him on that very night. And then He closes the chapter by praying for all believers through all times.
So let us look at verse 1, “After saying all these things, Jesus looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son so He can give glory back to You.” ‘After saying all these things.’ simply refers back to John 13, 14, 15, and 16. Then it says, “Jesus looks up to heaven.” It’s a magnificent gesture looking toward the God to whom He prays, His own God and Father.
Jesus said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify Your Son, that the Son may glorify You, 2 For you have given Him authority over everyone. He gives eternal life to each one you have given Him. 3 And this is the way to have eternal life—to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, the one you sent to earth. 4 I brought glory to you here on earth by completing the work you gave me to do.”
5 Now, Father, bring me into the glory we shared before the world began.” It is a prayer, first of all, for His own glory. So that, having been glorified, He can then bring many sons to glory. Somebody might say that Jesus praying for Himself seems self-seeking. That’s because we are fallen creatures who have no right to ask for glory on our own merit. But Christ was asking for something He deserved.
Jesus says, “Father, glorify You Son.” Verse 5 says, “Just glorify Me with the glory I had with You before the world began. Just take me back to the eternal glory, which is always mine by right. It is a prayer for the glory that belongs to Him. God could have used any kind of human analogy to describe the relationship of the Lord Jesus Christ to God the Father. But God chose Father and Son.
Why? Certainly because it is a way to emphasize their shared nature. But it’s more than that. It is intimate familiarity. It speaks not only that He was one in nature with God, but that He had a relationship with God that is described as loving care. When Jesus says Father and the Christian stands by His side and listens, he knows that the eternal and ultimate God is personal.
The sinful men, finds with real faith, no nature personified and deified by wish; but one who knows, wills, and loves unspeakably, with a fatherly tenderness. As a Father, He is the personally holy, personally faithful, personally gracious caretaker. He is the Father, for He is the Living Author of our personal life. He is the Father, and we are to Him more than the work of His hands.
We are His dear and precious possession. His delights are with the sons of men. As a Father, He pities the child of this mortal family with the pity which only a divine heart could know. Our Lord says, “Father, Holy Father, righteous Father, loving Father.” And we embrace that fatherhood as well. We have become children of God, and He is our Father also, with all that that means.
So with that introduction of Father, Jesus then says: “The hour has come.” In John 12, which was at the beginning of this Passion Week, He started to say, “The hour has come.” It’s an amazing statement. Every event, every day, every hour in the history of the unfolding drama of divine redemption is planned by God. Everything is under a divine timetable and by divine appointment.
There is a sovereign precision with which God operates His redemptive drama. And His work in the Son’s life, and His work in your life and my life, all operates on a divine schedule. Nothing is loosely ordained. History and redemptive accomplishment are a matter of divine moment by moment, materializing of God’s sovereign, divine plan. If you are His, you are on a precise divine timetable.
What time was it on the redemptive clock? The hour was the crux of history; the crux of eternity. It was the event of the ages. Two eternities were about to meet: eternity past and eternity future, and they would meet at the cross. The hour had come in which the Son of Man, the Son of God, would end His humiliation, would terminate His labors; and He would do that by becoming the sacrifice for sin.
And that sacrifice would extend back through all of human history to every person who had ever believed, and forward through history to every person who would ever believe. He would, in that moment, become sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. It was that fulfilled divine design, when God ordained that Christ be crucified before the foundation of the world.
God determined the names of those for whom His crucifixion would be, an effective sacrifice for their salvation. It was the moment when all the pre-creation, divine purposes of God reached an apex. It was the hour when all prophecies of salvation were fulfilled, when all the specific prophecies of Messiah were fulfilled, when all the types and all the symbols were fulfilled.
It was the hour of triumph over the prince of the power of the air. It was the hour of dismissing the old and ushering in the new. It was the hour of salvation, when all that God had promised in salvation was then made possible, and made actual. Christ actually died for all who believed throughout all of human history going back and going forward. It was the hour of the cross where this was accomplished.
In John 12:23 Jesus says, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” In verses 27 - 28 He says, “Now my soul is deeply troubled. Should I pray, ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But this is the very reason I came! 28 Father, bring glory to your name.” Then a voice spoke from heaven, saying, “I have already brought glory to My name, and I will do so again.”
This is that hour of the cross. He was revolted by the prospect of experiencing the wrath of God: sin-bearing, being punished for all the sins of all the people through human history who would ever be redeemed. It troubled Him profoundly beyond anything we can imagine. But what was He going to say: “Save Me from this hour”? Of course not. “For this hour I came into the world.”
Here is it, the climax, the glory hour; to blot out the power of the curse, to reconcile sinners to God, to illuminate the obscured spiritual kingdom. This is the hour God planned from eternity past. Peter said that on the Day of Pentecost: “This has all happened by the pre-determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God.” This was God’s plan from the very beginning.
Look at Isaiah 53, he means the cross; the resurrection; the ascension and the coronation. As Jesus was nailed to a cross, He became sin for His people, to bear the wrath of God. In that moment the sun refused to shine and darkness prevailed. In that moment the earth rocked and graves opened and dead people came out. There had never been a moment like it, and never would be again.
To the disciples, the death of the Lord seemed like a nightmare. But to Christ, it meant full glory. The hour has come to glorify Your Son as the One fulfilling all the prophecies. As the Mediator, the Substitute, the Anointed One as the Lamb of God. Jesus saw glory in the cross and so do we. He is praying, “Father, grant that by means of this event on the cross, I may be glorified.”
It was glory that belonged to Him, as verse 5 says. It was the glory that He had before creation. He desires full glory, the glory that comes to one who has been perfectly obedient to the Father throughout His life, the glory of being the perfect Lamb of God and doing the will of God. He prays for the Father now to take Him through the cross, out of the grave; take Him to heaven.
Nothing can ever separate you from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus. The atoning work of Jesus Christ finished your salvation forever. He has granted you already eternal life which cannot perish. The Holy Spirit is in you, as the seal of God’s final security. The great High Priest is ever-living to make intercession for us, to bring us to glory. That’s how the prayer begins. Let’s pray.