Ask and you shall receive: the disciples had asked Jesus how to pray, and he gave them the Lord’s Prayer in response to their request. But Jesus had other prayers recorded in the gospels, the longest of which is John 17. These prayers are windows into the indescribable relationship between Heavenly Father and Son, given to us so we can look through that window into heaven itself.
Jesus ends his Farewell Discourse with a prayer, and within that prayer are three expanding sections. In the first section (17:1-5) Jesus prays for himself, with prayers only God could pray. Jesus prays “Glorify your Son,” to a God who had said He will not give his glory to another (Isaiah 42:8; 48:11). This paradox is only solved if the Son and Father are truly one God, unified with the Spirit in three persons unblended.
If John 17:2 sounds familiar, it’s because Jesus prays to the father with the same concept, using different words, in Matthew 11:27. This prayer in Matthew sounds as if it was lifted from John – this is how Jesus prayed. In Matthew, Jesus prays “All things were delivered to me by my Father”; in John, Jesus speaks to the Father in the second person and of himself in the third person, “You have given everything to him.” The two sentences may diagram differently, but the Father’s gift is the exact same in both cases: everything.
This all-gift transcends time and space. Through Jesus, heaven’s eternity invades the present. The difference between “The Age to Come” and “the present age” is collapsed. This is why John is consistently inconsistent with his verb tenses (as you may have noticed I am when I write about John!), but likes to use the present tense, and therefore, so do I. Jesus’s prayer is happening now.
This is why one of my favorite lines from a current worship song is the surprising past tense at the end of this stanza, “By His blood and in His name // In His freedom I am free // For the love of Jesus Christ // Who has resurrected me.” (“King of Kings”)
An Eastern Orthodox Eucharistic prayer also mixes tenses: “Remembering this saving commandment and all those things which have come to pass for us: the Cross, the Tomb, the Resurrection on the third day, the Ascension into heaven, the Sitting at the right hand, and the Second and glorious Coming.”
The future resurrection has been brought into the present, the future Second coming has “come to pass for us,” through the mystery of the eternal God enfleshed. Throughout John, this distinction between past, present, and future has been crumbling. Jesus was there at the beginning, and his voice brings the future resurrection life into the present.
He who always was, is, and will be has submitted himself to time’s sequences of seasons, days, and hours, and now his hour has come. You must read John in order, the same way you open advent calendar windows in order. But you can peek with the eyes of faith, and you know the end of the story as you walk through it again and again, different each time.
Jesus’s prayer, a line of words given to 11 people in a quiet room, expands in time and space. In the second section, Jesus prays for the disciples (17:6-19), and in the third he prays for “those having faith in me on account of their word” (17:20), which is US. He’s praying for us!
For the disciples, he prays for protection and sanctification/consecration. For us, he prays for unity, the unity that comes from seeing the glory of the one God, and knowing God’s love, which is knowing God. This is not a forced unity from violent coercion, but a freely accepted unity of love, everyone looking to and reflecting the Triune God who is both three and one. We aren’t there yet, but the future is breaking in as Jesus’s prayer continues to echo.
Jesus prays two other times with words that Matthew records, but John does not. The first is the famous one, THE Lord’s Prayer. The second is shorter but much, much harder to pray. It is the prayer that falls between John 18:1 and 18:2, when Jesus is in Gethsemane. This prayer is “Not my will, but Thine be done.” (Luke 22:42 KJV)
Jesus had mixed his spit with the dirt In John 9, while healing a blind man. Now his divine flesh mixes with the earth again as “his sweat became like drops of blood falling to the earth.” (Luke 22:44b) This turmoil and mixing, carried out in darkness, can make us see, and can heal the world.
Jesus wrestled with God at night in a prayer deeper than words can convey. This was not ordinary fear of death – Jesus has been talking about his death for years with calm composure. As Rudolf Otto writes, “No, there is more here than the fear of death; there is the awe of the creature before the mysterium tremendum, before the shuddering secret of the numen [the transcendent].”
“And the old tales come back into our mind as strangely parallel and, as it were, prophetically significant, the tales of Yahweh who waylaid Moses by night, and of Jacob who wrestled with God ‘until the breaking of the day’… In truth even those who cannot recognize ‘the Holy One of Israel’ elsewhere in the God of the Gospel must at least discover Him here, if they have eyes to see at all.”
So look at this scene: Breath, tears, and sweat are mixed with the spring night air surrounding Gethsemane’s olive trees. Past and present are mixed, and Father, Son, and Spirit groan. Denys Turner writes, “Jesus’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane and on Golgotha is where the Trinity is inscribed within time, history, and human experience, inscribed upon our sensual, animal being.”
And as Jesus prays in pain, as his disciples sleep, a line of torches led by Judas Iscariot climbs the Mount of Olives toward the Light of the World. It is the darkest night.
QUOTES: Orthodox prayer of St. John Chrysostom quoted by Fr. Stephen Freeman in “Remembering the End”; “Prayer and the Darkness of God,” by Denys Turner in Church Life Journal, January 20, 2020; Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, p. 85.
IMAGE: Prayer Circle, by Lauren Duncan https://lauren-duncan-art.myshopify.com/products/paper-prints-of-2020-prayer-circles
