If you would please turn with me in your Bibles to John chapter 17, beginning at the first verse. When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven and said, ‘Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.’
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the gift of eternal life, the gift of your Son that we celebrate today. Help us to hear you speak, and help us to respond to your call upon our life with faith and obedience, all born up in love for Jesus’ sake. Amen.
Now, chapter 17 of John’s gospel is often called Jesus’s high priestly prayer because it is his longest recorded prayer. And because it is a prayer where he asks God for us. It is a beautiful example of Jesus praying to our heavenly Father. And across this prayer, Jesus prays for himself. He prays for his disciples who were present. And he even prays for us today.
Through this prayer, Jesus acted as our high priest. He was performing one of the two principal duties of them, intercession. And he did it within the context of preparing a sin offering for sacrifice. While he was preparing himself to be the sufficient sacrifice for our sin. In doing so, he knew that soon he would be performing their other duty, offering the sacrifice itself for our atonement.
Now, this prayer has been very impactful in the lives of countless saints. It has been a great comfort and a source of encouragement for many believers. For example, knowing that as he lay on his deathbed with his time to pass imminently closing, John Knox commanded his wife to go read where I cast my first act anchor, asking her to read him this passage because it was comforting to hear our Lord pray for him. Confidently believing that in that moment, so long before on the night of his arrest, Jesus was holding him personal and specifically in mind.
So, as we read through chapter 17, we can tell by the manner that the evangelist presents this moment within the passion narrative that he wants us to fully and rightly understand what Jesus was doing. John is trying to help us to understand the mindset of Jesus in that moment. Understanding that Jesus knew precisely what he was doing. Knowing how the upcoming events would each occur and so was preparing himself and his disciples for the coming ordeal.
But, since so many things have already occurred during that one evening and have been described here throughout the proceeding three chapters, we should pause a moment and quickly review them. Cuz during this Passover evening, Jesus has already washed the disciples’ feet, warned them of Judas’s impending betrayal, commanded them to love one another just as I have loved you, warned Peter of his imminent triple denial. He’s declared, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through me.’
He’s told them that he will ask the Father to send them another Paraclete, another helper, the Holy Spirit, to come sanctify them, to teach them, and dwell within them alongside the Father and the Son. Jesus has declared, ‘I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine dresser. I am the vine, you are the branches. That whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. For apart from me, you can do nothing.’
Thus describing the necessity of a Christian’s union into him. Jesus has called his disciples his friends. He’s warned them to expect experiencing the world’s hatred because it has hated him first. He’s explained more about what the Holy Spirit will do when he comes from the Father. He’s comforted them by telling them that while they shall be sorrowful and shall grieve for him, their sadness will become joy very soon afterwards.
And lastly, Jesus had declared, ‘In the world, you will have tribulation. But take heart, I, Jesus, have overcome the world,’ proclaiming his ultimate triumph that was soon about to be fully realized in time. And so then, after all of this, when Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted his eyes up to heaven and he began to pray.
And Jesus first prayed, ‘Father, the hour has come.’ Throughout John’s gospel, there have been repeated references to a particular hour, to a particular and specific moment in time. And through his use, we know that this hour did not refer to some certain 60 minutes. But it was a metaphor to describe an anticipated moment or unique occasion or event.
We recall that at Cana it was not Jesus’ hour. During the Feast of Booths, when Jesus was teaching, it was not Jesus’ hour. And when Jesus taught in the temple afterward, after that feast, it still was not Jesus’ hour, though the Pharisees were wanting him arrested. But after Jesus was received triumphantly into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, when even the Gentiles and Greeks had begun to show interest in this Jesus of Nazareth, he declared, ‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.’
So now we know that the hour for Jesus’ glorification was surely here, an hour which we understand stretches from that triumphal entry through the crucifixion and then beyond and through his ascension into the present and our eternal future. Next, Jesus prayed that the Father would ‘glorify your Son, that the Son may glorify you.’
Jesus prayed for something that probably feels slightly uncomfortable and awkward for us—praying for glory. He prayed for something which if we were praying for it, it would be considered to be something self-righteous, selfish, and full of hubris. But when Jesus asked God his Father for glory, he was asking for it with specific purpose and good intention. Asking for glory so that he could better glorify his Father in heaven, to better worship God by working for the Father’s glory instead of his own.
Jesus asked for this glory so that he could do the work that he had been given to do by the Father more effectively, to rightly do the work that he had come down from heaven to earth to do. He asked for this glory because the Father had given him authority over all flesh to give eternal life to all whom the Father had given him. So that Jesus could and would give life to all of God’s elect people, whether they are ethnic Jews or Gentiles or our forebears in the faith or believers that are yet to be born.
But we should note Jesus’ specificity in this request. Cuz Jesus has been given authority over all flesh. He had been given the absolute authority in this moment to perform one specific and singular task: to give eternal life to all whom the Father had given him. At this moment in time, Jesus had not yet been given all authority, meaning that while Jesus, he is God the Son, and he truly does possess all authority in heaven and on earth as the sovereign Lord, he did not have the present permission of the Father to exert that authority.
It was not part of the divine will that Jesus should exert the fullness of his rightful authority at that moment. But instead to willingly submit himself to lawful authority and suffer the abuse of that authority at the hands of sinful men, namely the Jews and their high priest, as well as the Romans and their governor. But even during his submission, Jesus possessed the lawful authority to give eternal life. Because it would be through his willing submission to their authority that he would give it and glorify his Father in heaven.
And so Jesus continued to pray, saying, ‘I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do.’ Yes, the work of Jesus’ earthly ministry glorified the Father. All of his teaching and all of his miracles and wonders glorified God. But at that moment in time, all of Jesus’ earthly work was not completed. Even though its completion was certain by divine decree and ordination and in the divine perspective from outside of time.
But here within time, Jesus still had the crucifixion crucible ahead of him. But nevertheless, Jesus had been doing the works that had been given to him by the Father. And he would still continue to do the Father’s work. But which work did Jesus mean here? When he said that it had been accomplished, completed, past tense. What was that work, really? Was it the whole of his ministry? I mean, how great was his ministry, really? Did Jesus do everything that he could have done?
I mean, although Jesus could have healed every person around him or even everyone in the whole world by simply uttering a word of command—just as he healed the Capernaum official’s son—but he did not. And although Jesus could have raised up all of the deceased, widows could have received their husbands back, orphans could have had their parents returned, and grieving parents could have had their children restored to them—just as he raised Lazarus—but he did not.
And while Jesus could have calmed every storm. And he could have walked across every sea. And he could have provided everyone with enough food and refreshment to everybody who hungered and thirsted. But he did not. While performing those works, as great, good, and wondrous as they were, they were not the primary work that Jesus was sent into the world to accomplish. They were not the work given him by the Father that Jesus had fully accomplished at this moment.
The specific work that Jesus is referring to in his prayer was his work of living a perfectly righteous life, living in perfect obedience to the Father and God’s perfect law. We believe that at that moment of time, Jesus had fully satisfied the righteous requirement that Adam failed to meet. Jesus had perfectly passed the probationary test that Adam failed. Jesus, in that moment, was the perfect example of human perfection—sinless and without blemish.
Jesus, in that moment, was declaring himself to be truly the perfect Passover lamb given by God the Father for the redemption of elect humanity so that we might be and would be passed over by his just wrath, given as the propitiation for our sins. So once again, Merry Christmas.
But this work, this work is an important part of our Christian faith that we often ignore or forget. This is the part that actually gets us across the spiritual finish line. We generally focus on the atoning work of Jesus on the cross, his death, believing and trusting that that is what gets us into heaven. But really, that’s only half the story.
Cuz dying on the cross, Jesus took our deserved condemnation for sin on himself, dying to sin for us and so putting the power of our sin to death, killing our sin. Dying on the cross, Jesus atoned for our sin as a willing substitute, the righteous for the unrighteous, paying and suffering our deserved penalty. But it was not his death that justifies us before the Father’s judgment throne. Dying on the cross, Jesus did not make us righteous in the sight of God.
But rather, he made us to no longer be unrighteous in God’s sight. I mean, Jesus took all of our sins upon himself, imputed them to himself, credited responsibility for them to his account without having been personally guilty of them. He took all of our moral debt away. Dying on the cross, Jesus then wiped out our debt of sin. He canceled it, marked it paid in full, and therefore he made us morally neutral. Making us be neither unrighteous nor righteous.
And if we focus all of our faith upon, if all we’re trusting in is Jesus’ death on the cross and merely believing that Jesus earned us forgiveness for our sin through this gracious work, then we remain lost. If all we are trusting in Jesus for is his work on the cross—that he’s only restored us up to this state of moral neutrality—then really, we’re still trusting in ourselves for our salvation. We’re still trusting that our good works will make us righteous since Jesus has wiped out all our moral badness.
That’s just another kind of Pelagianism, believing that Jesus’ grace just makes up for whatever moral difference is needed and remains to get us into heaven. Cuz we’re just assuming that we only just needed a little help from our friend Jesus, that we did all the rest ourselves.
See, this is where the God-glorifying work that Jesus had already accomplished at that moment of time matters for us. Cuz the God-glorifying work that Jesus accomplished was his righteous life, his earned righteousness, his sinlessness, him having never succumbed to Satan’s temptations. And him never transgressing any of the Lord’s negative commandments, the thou shalt nots, and his fulfillment of their positive opposite by doing what he should do.
See, the God-glorifying work that Jesus had accomplished at this point in his life’s narrative is the righteousness that he has imputed to us when he took our sin for himself. His righteousness. This work was the robe of righteousness that he clothed us in as our garment of salvation. This righteousness is what brings our moral account into the positive.
Well, Jesus’ death on the cross brought our account out of the red. It was Jesus’ perfectly righteous life that brings us up into the black. And when we lose sight of this fact, of the need for Jesus’ lived righteousness, we risk reducing the story of Jesus’ life as presented in the gospel to merely be moralistic examples. Cuz then, every time that Jesus showed his love for neighbor, every act of healing that he did, every feeding, and every act of compassion is simply reduced to an example for us to follow.
Some might consider that to be a perfect or ideal example. But if they’re only examples, then they each become at best a should rather than a must. And if we reduce Jesus’ life to merely being a succession of moral examples, then we also rob his death on the cross of power. Cuz then the cross simply becomes an example of self-sacrifice.
And if the cross was just an example of self-sacrifice, then there is no atonement. Cuz Jesus wouldn’t have died to pay for our sins but as an example for us to emulate. And if Jesus didn’t die on the cross as a penal satisfaction for sin’s offense, for our sin’s offense, then his death on the cross would have been functionally unnecessary. And they would be right to call it a horrific act of cosmic child abuse.
And if Jesus did not actually die to pay for our sin, then God’s mercy and forgiveness is reduced to just a divine hand wave as he simply winks at sin rather than punishing it. And the resurrection is reduced to just an example of what a good person might hope for rather than being the sign of God’s promises fulfilled. But those are all lies. Those all belong to the false gospels of liberal Christianity and progressivism.
They belong to faithless and dead religion. And both Jesus’s death and his perfectly righteous life matter for our salvation. Cuz unless we have both, we have neither. So here at that moment, in the midst of his prayer, Jesus, we remember, had already accomplished the work of earning righteousness for us, glorifying God the Father while doing so.
And then all that now remained for him to do before he gave eternal life to the elect was for him to go to the cross and make satisfaction for our sin, offering himself as our perfect sacrificial substitute. Finally, Jesus prayed, ‘Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.’
Jesus asked to be restored to the Father’s presence. He asked to be restored from his kenosis, from his emptying of himself as described by Paul in Philippians 2, to be restored from the humiliation of his incarnation, to being made human, and to again be exalted by the Father. And looking ahead, we know that this prayer will be answered, and we know how.
And surely, while Jesus was praying it, he also knew that it would be answered, including the how and the when. But even having this foreknowledge, it did not prevent, hinder, or limit his prayer. Jesus prayed with certainty and with confidence, believing in and trusting that the Father would answer him because he knew that it was within the Father’s will.
And this example of Jesus praying should fill each of us with a similar confidence when we pray in Jesus’ name, praying in and praying for God’s will to be done. Nevertheless, Jesus asked for and he knew that he would be restored to the glory that he possessed in the beginning, for truly he never lost it. And he never actually left the Father’s presence.
But the glory of God and the fact of his presence was obscured and hidden through the incarnation. So here within Jesus’ prayer for himself, Jesus asked the Lord for glory so that he could glorify God. Jesus announced the authority that he already possessed, the authority in charge to give eternal life to God’s chosen elect people for the purpose of glorifying God.
And Jesus asserted the fact that he has already glorified the Father by accomplishing the work he’s been given, by him living this perfectly righteous and sinless life. And Jesus asked the Father to restore him to the fullness of his presence and the glory that he had before creation.
But there is a critically important question here in this passage that we have not yet addressed. What is eternal life? As Christians, we really ought to know what eternal life is since we’re hoping for it and since we talk about it so much amongst ourselves and because we often use that expression, eternal life, holding out as a carrot to non-believers when we try to have an evangelistic conversation.
So what is eternal life? Is it merely the unending continuation of our present existence, though in a spiritual sphere rather than the physical? No. Is it a new spiritual life that’s lived in heaven that we get to enjoy after we die? A lived experience comprised of clouds, wings, or of golden harps and trumpets? No. Will it be a physical existence where each of us possess our ideal 33-year-old form since that was the age of Jesus when he was crucified and one which we shall all speak and read ancient Hebrew because that is the only true divine language? I’m confident that’s also highly improbable.
So no. But, there are many people who do believe such things. Unfortunately, we do not need to speculate or create such fantasies because scripture, when we consider it as a whole, provides us with a solid impression and expectation.
So, the Lord’s original offer of eternal life to Adam through his access to the tree of life that he had originally, and then its prohibition, we know that there must be a physical element to eternal life. A life that the Greeks called bios. And since the Lord he originally made Adam by forming him from the dust of the ground and then he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and later used the flood to destroy all flesh which has the breath of life in it under heaven, we know that there must also be a companion kind of spiritual life that the Greek word is Zoe. A companion to our physical life. A spiritual component that can be broken and killed.
For we know that the wages of sin is death. The Old Testament applies the idea that our physical life continues even when that spirit is dead. Cuz the Lord promised to eventually revive the spirit of the lowly and revive the heart of the contrite. Which leads to Jesus’ assertion to Nicodemus that unless one is born of water and the spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.
That which is born of the flesh is flesh. And that which is born of the spirit is spirit. You must be born again. Teaching that true life, eternal life, requires the living presence of both bios and Zoe together. Both the Apostle Paul and Peter, they taught that believers were made to be alive in Christ, referring plainly to our spiritual living, to our regeneration by the Holy Spirit, to our having been born again to a Zoe that does not end when our bios ends.
And meanwhile, Paul, he taught about and described the future resurrection of our bios and its reunification with our Zoe. Writing, ‘So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown a natural body, it’s raised a spiritual body. And if there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. For it is written, the first man Adam became a living being. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit.
The first man was from the earth, the man of dust. The second man is from heaven. As with the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust. And as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are born of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.’
So we must conclude from this biblical theology that eternal life is something both physical and spiritual. But this unified physical and spiritual state of being is also not itself eternal life, though it is an expressed consequence of it. Cuz Jesus, here in his high priestly prayer, told his disciples and he tells us what eternal life truly is. Using plain speech, Jesus said, ‘And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.’
So eternal life is actually the knowledge of God. It’s not merely knowledge about God, like being able to describe his attributes or explain his covenant promises. It is consequential knowledge. Eternal life is the relational knowledge of God. To know and be known by, to understand and be understood by, and to be in covenant with.
See, eternal life is not simply a matter of knowing that the Lord is God and that there is no other, knowing that Jesus is the Christ, God the Son, the Son of God, and the Logos, who is Theos and Andros, because even the demons believe that and shudder. So, no. The kind of knowledge that Jesus is speaking of here is so intimate and so close that it can only be had and may only be known if a person is united into and identified with Jesus Christ.
This kind of knowledge can only be had by someone that has been grafted into the true vine of Christ. Something that can only be initiated by the divine vine dresser, God the Father, and something that is only produced through the Holy Spirit’s regeneration and his life-supporting tender and merciful care.
Meanwhile, the effect of having this consequential knowledge is that such a person will receive the full benefit of the covenant of grace: redemption from our bondage to Satan, forgiveness and satisfaction for our moral debts of sin through Jesus’ death on the cross, justification as being righteous before God the Father, clothed with Jesus’ righteousness, and adoption as God’s beloved child and made to become an heir of heaven with Jesus, our elder brother.
Again, this is why remembering Jesus’ work of living a perfectly righteous life is so important for us as Christians united into him. It’s because through knowing God and by being united into Jesus that we now possess his morally righteous life. His perfect obedience is credited to us. And having this righteousness is what grants us the right to also possess the eternal life first promised to Adam in the covenant of works, promising Adam eternal life for perfect obedience.
As Moses writes about the righteousness that’s based on the law, the righteousness that Jesus himself earned as a work accomplished, so that the person who does the commandments shall live by them. So, together through the accomplished works of his life and death on the cross that Jesus earned both our forgiveness for sin through the atoning satisfaction of his death and our right to life eternal under the law through the righteousness of his life.
Being grafted into the vine of Christ, so that just as our sin became his and his righteousness became ours, so too our deserved death became his and his deserved life became ours. And that brings us to the resurrection—the resurrection of Jesus, which we come here and celebrate today. Cuz Jesus’ resurrection was the final miracle and the final proof of both who Jesus is—Lord God Almighty—and what Jesus has done for us. Redeemed us from our sin and earned us a place in heaven with him.
His dying, Jesus cried out, ‘Tetelestai.’ It is finished or ‘The debt is paid.’ By rising from the dead, God the Father affirmed God the Son’s righteousness by restoring to life and glorifying the only man without sin, affirming him as the only man who did not deserve to die, affirming him as the only man who truly deserved to live.
By rising from the dead, God the Father confirmed the truth about everything that Jesus had ever said, proving him to not only be filled with the truth but to be truth himself. Rising from the dead, God the Father confirmed Jesus as God the Son, restoring to Jesus the glory that he had from before the very beginning, when he was simply the word, when he was simply with God, and when he was simply and when simply he was God.
By rising from the dead, God the Father affirmed Jesus Christ is God eternally. God’s not dead. He is alive. He is risen. He is risen indeed. You believe this and know God and Jesus Christ whom he sent. Know them. Believe them and be saved. Hallelujah. Amen.