John 17
Butler1. THESE words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour 2 is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee: as thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him. 3 And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ 4 whom thou hast sent. I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work 5 which thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self, with the glory which I had with thee before the world was. 6 I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world: 7 thine they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have kept thy word. Now they 8 have known that all things whatsoever thou hast given me are of thee: for I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send 9 me. I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given 10 me; for they are thine. And all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified 11 in them. And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, 12 that they may be one, as we are. While I was with them in the world, I kept them in thy name: those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost, but the son of perdition; that the scripture might be fulfilled.
THIS Intercessory Prayer of the Lord carries the mind and the heart of one who reverently ponders it to the ultimate point of spiritual contemplation attainable on earth. It is wholly impossible—inconceiv- able, even—that it should have been imagined and cunningly framed by a human author. It implies the perfect Mediatorial consciousness of which it is the consistent idiomatic utterance. It manifests, in words lucid as sunbeams, the fraternal, prophetic, and kingly spirit of him who is one with his followers on earth, and one equally with the infinite Father, whom he at once addresses and reveals. The tone of it is not of a suppliant pleading, but of a companion expressing his desires. He discerns the needs of which those for whom he intercedes are not yet aware. With divine insight, to which measures of time are noth- ing, he anticipates the whole development and progress, the long struggle and the final achievement, of his kingdom in the world. The glory which he has had is present in his thoughts. The glory which he shall have, and in which his disciples shall be partakers, is as palpable before him. His feet are still upon the earth, and ready to tread with unfaltering steps the Via Dolorosa. But his head is already crowned as he prays with the sun-bright splendor which John saw afterward in the Apocalypse. More plainly than in miracle, law, instruction, he stands before us in this prayer, the Divine Person, who has entered into man’s nature to redeem it, and has sought the earth that we may seek, with assured hope, his native and reëntered heaven.
How wonderful that operation of the Spirit on the mind of the Evangelist which recalled to him after- ward, with faithful fulness, these self-demonstrating and inimitable words! How overwhelming that mystery of anguish which directly afterward wrung from the same supreme soul that prayer in the garden, when “his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground!” How inspiring the thought that the same intercession goes on above, and never ceases, for the Church which still is so feeble in faith, for the disciples of our own day, whose love is so languid, whose fears are so great, whose needs so many! R. S. S.
WITH the words, “Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world,” the Lord closed his farewell discourse to his disciples. To the fulness of consolation, which in this discourse he has bequeathed to his Church, his love would yet add another jewel; and he spoke aloud the emotions which in this hour, while interceding before his Father, moved his high-priestly heart. To heaven ascends the voice of prayer from the only-begotten Son, who, in his brethren’s flesh, overcomes the world and goes to the Father, that he may bestow upon them the glory which the Father has given to him.
There is a sense in which believers, who have once for all entered into sonship with God, are daily in need of Christ’s intercession. This is the intercession which the great High-Priest here offers to the Father, for the keeping and perfecting of his apostles, and of his whole Church, which, to the inexhaustible comfort of his people, he carries on still in heaven, and which is really and powerfully effectual. Melanchthon, whose last lecture, shortly before his death, was on this passage, thus extols its glory: “There is no voice which has ever been heard, either in heaven or in earth, more exalted, more holy, more fruitful, more sublime, than this prayer offered up by the Son of God himself.” R. B.
First, Christ prays for himself, asking for his glorification, because he is the corner-stone of the Church, and because out of his merits alone descends to us every spiritual and heavenly blessing. Then he prays for the apostles, the ordained teachers of all the world, who in the word of the gospel were to offer to mankind those treasures of salvation which Christ has obtained for us; on which account they are called the foundation of the Church, upon which all other believers are built. Lastly, he prays for the whole Church, whose members believe on him through the apostles’ word. Gerhard.
Even in his prayer for his own glorification, the Lord acted as our high-priest; since it is for us, as our Jesus, that he has been glorified with the glory which, as the eternal Word, the Creator of every creature, he had with the Father before the world was. But presently in express terms he presents his own people (the apostles, and in them, also, all true disciples) to the Father in his name, and prays for them. R. B.
1. Lifted his eyes to heaven.** Not his hands, for he prays not as a suppliant—but as an intercessor and high-priest, standing between earth and heaven. Father. Not our Father, which he never could say: nor my Father, which would be too great a separation between himself and his people for such a prayer; but simply FATHER: that great name in which all the mystery of Redemption is summed up. A.
The hour is come. The hour long anticipated, most eventful, toward which my whole earthly life has looked and all its labors have been shaped—this great hour of crisis, of issues, of consummation—of trial, pain, arrest, torture, conflict with Satan, death, resurrection, ascension, triumph, eternal glory—how do the grand issues of my earthly mission culminate upon this momentous hour! H. C.—The hour is come! How much this expresses! filial obedience, filial intimacy, filial hope and joy. The hour! It is the hour for which he has patiently waited, to which he has looked forward, yet has never sought to hurry on; the hour appointed by his Father, about which Father and Son have always had an understanding, and of which none but they have any knowledge. A. B. B.
Glorify thy Son, that thy Son may glorify thee! A proof that the Son is equal to the Father as touching his Godhood, for what creature could stand before his Creator and utter them? Stier.—The glorifying of the Father is the whole great result of the Son’s glorification by the Father—the manifestation of God to and in men by the Son through the Spirit.
2. All flesh.** The whole creation is given by the Father to Christ: is his to rule and to judge by virtue of his being in the root of that human nature, to which sovereignty over the world was given, the second and righteous Adam. But in this wide gift, there is a more special gift—“as many as thou hast given him”—in the stricter sense, the chosen, they who believe on him. And to them, and them only, he imparts the further ineffable gift consequent on union with him—eternal life! A.
3. That they might know thee.** If God shall be known as a God merciful and gracious, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgressions and sin, he must come forth in person, show us his glory, cause all his goodness to pass before, and proclaim his name, “Jehovah! Jehovah! God merciful and gracious!” This God has done, but ever by the person and the word of his only-begotten Son. He alone hath declared him. The Jehovah of the olden time was therefore the Son of God. The Jesus of the latter time was proclaimed at Jordan the Son of God. The Lord Jehovah, and the Lord Jesus, one and the same, is the radiance of the glory, the character of the person, of God. You who will know God seek him in his Son. Behold him walking as the angel Jehovah in the ancient Church, behold him walking as the Christ in the midst of his disciples. God is not other than you see him here; God is just what you see him here. There is no hidden element of the divine nature slumbering in the Father in heaven while other elements are manifest in Jesus Christ. Mysteriously, yet most really, is the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father. J. T. D.
Life eternal. That “life eternal” which he is to give to believers, is not merely to know that Jehovah is the one true God and that Jesus is his Son; but to know them as such. It signifies that what is thus known of God and of his Son is wrought into the very life of the soul; develops the spirit of loving obedience, and the simple trust of faith—so that thus knowing God intelligently, they become in spirit and life his children. H. C.—The knowledge spoken of is that living realization of knowledge, that oneness in will with God, and partaking of his nature, which is itself life eternal: the knowledge, love, enjoyment of him who is infinite, being themselves infinite. A.
Jesus Christ. This is the only place where our Lord gives himself this compound name, afterward so current in apostolic preaching and writing. Here the terms are used in their strict signification: “JESUS,” because he “saves his people from their sins;” “CHRIST,” as anointed with the measureless fulness of the Holy Ghost for the exercise of his saving offices. Whom thou hast sent. In the plenitude of divine authority and power, to save. B.—The very juxtaposition here of Jesus Christ with the Father is a proof, by implication, of our Lord’s Godhead. The knowledge of God and a creature could not be eternal life, and such an association of the one with the other would be inconceivable. 4. The work. Not only the ministerial life of our Lord, but the whole life with all its appointed manifestations of humility and purity, and his prophetic and declarative office, terminated by his passion and death. A.
5. Glorify thou me.** The “I thee” and “Thou me” are so placed in the original, each beside its fellow, as to show that a perfect reciprocity of services of the Son to the Father first, and then of the Father to the Son in return, is what our Lord means here to express. B.—With the glory which I had with thee. Jesus seems to stand in thought at the point of consummation, where he looks upon the period of his humiliation as closing, and lifts up his prayer for the glory that lay beyond. Bring me home to that glory in which I dwelt with thee in the eternal ages before this world’s creation, that coequal dignity and glory in which I dwelt from eternity with thee. It would seem that in this prayer the divine—not the human—consciousness is in the foreground—the word “I” in the phrase “which I had with thee” representing the eternal Word, who was from the beginning “with God.” H. C.
This prayer expresses the consciousness that Jesus had of himself as an incarnation, and of his eternal preëxistence with the Father. He does not say the glory that I received from thee, by promise, at my coming into the world, but the glory which I had with thine own self, in a unity of participation with the Godhead before the world was. “He always was having it, was in possession of it; he never began to have it” (Bengel). In this utterance, surely, he made himself God. J. P. T.—The same Person who had with the Father glory before the world, also glorified the Father in the world, and prays to be again received into that glory: a decisive proof of the unity of the Person of Christ, in his three estates of eternal preëxistence in glory, humiliation in the flesh, and glorification in the resurrection-body. A.
6. Thy name.** From the cradle to the grave, from Jordan to the brook Kedron, from the Mount of Transfiguration to the fatal hill of Golgotha, the whole of Christ’s life, his sufferings and his death—ay, and afterward his resurrection—are nothing but the most clear and most blessed revelation of the name of God by which he will be called by us. We see and hear nothing but his goodness and glory in which he passes before us, and in his own person, in the highest possible degree his own, with hands uplifted to bless, he proclaims to us his name, that he is merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and of great goodness and truth. Löhe.
Which thou gavest. The Father gave them to Christ by leading them to Christ. A.—All true believers may fairly take comfort in the thought, that they were known and cared for and given to Christ by an eternal covenant, long before they knew Christ cared for them. It is an unspeakable comfort to remember that Christ cares for that which the Father has given him. J. C. R.—And every worshipper of God, in spirit and in truth, can urge whatever concern weighs upon his mind as God’s own affair, and on that ground appeal to the honor of his name. Rieger.
8. I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me.** On the truth of this saying stands the whole fabric of creeds and doctrines. It is the ground of authority to the preacher, of assurance to the believer, of existence to the Church. It is the source from which the perpetual stream of Christian teaching flows. All our testimonies, instructions, exhortations, derive their first origin and continuous power from the fact that the Father has given to the Son, the Son has given to the servants, the words of truth and life. . . . There is no part of the later and larger New Testament doctrine which has not its germs and principles in the words which he spake in the days of his flesh. And it is made clear by his own promises beforehand, and by the distinct assertions of the men whom he employs, that, when his own voice has ceased on earth, it is nevertheless he who teaches still. T. D. B.
9. It is one of several minute coincidences (unavoidably obliterated in the English version) which show how uniformly our Lord claimed his divine origin, that whereas he used the word aito, of all other prayers to God—being the word used of petitions to one who is superior—the word he uses to describe his own prayers is eroto, which is (strictly speaking) the request of an equal from an equal. F.
10. Literally, all my things are thine, and thy things are mine. Absolute community of property between the Father and the Son is here expressed as nakedly as words can do it. B.
11. Keep those thou hast given me.** Even when filled with the assurance of resuming his glory, he remembers the ties of earthly friendship and of spiritual communion that bind him to his disciples; and, while his eyes are lifted up to heaven, his heart is twined about those who are to be left alone. Nothing short of his own glory will suffice him as a benediction upon them. J. P. T.
12. But the son of perdition.** “But” is here an “adversative,” not an “exceptive” word. “Out of those thou gavest me, not one is lost. But there is one who is lost, even Judas, the son of perdition.” J. C. R.
Section 148.—Prayer for their Sanctification and Oneness.
The Guest-Chamber.
13. And now come I to thee, and these things I speak in the world, that they might have 14 my joy fulfilled in themselves. I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated 15 them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. I pray not that thou shouldst take them out of the world, but that thou shouldst keep them 16, 17 from the evil. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. Sanctify 18 them through thy truth: thy word is truth. As thou hast sent me into the world, even 19 so have I also sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth. 20 Neither pray I for these alone; but for them also which shall believe on me through 21 their word: that they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that 22 they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. And the glory which thou gavest me, I have given them; that they may be one, even as we 23 are one; I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them as thou hast loved me. 24 Father, I will that they also whom thou hast given me be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory which thou hast given me: for thou lovedst me before the 25 foundation of the world. O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee; but I 26 have known thee, and these have known that thou hast sent me. And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved me, may be in them, and I in them.
THIS heavenly discourse and prayer have been the treasure of his people in every age, sounding to us like the silver bells on the high-priest’s garment, which told the people without that he was still living, and interceding for them within the vali. When we would have our hearts warmed to the memorial of the death of Christ, let us think of the thoughts that then glowed around it, and that breathe of the very incense which he offers for us now in the golden censer before the throne. If we come to his cross and table with sincere faith, we have our interest in his never-dying advocacy, and we abide all our days under the shadow of those arms that were outstretched upon the cross to suffer, and that are now lifted up on the throne to plead for us. How strong may we not feel in all our conflicts on the plain, while such a Prophet is praying for us on the mount! The humblest look upward to the pure and true—the feeblest cry for aid in the battle against sin—finds a face to represent it, and a voice to speak for it before the throne of God. Only let your look and cry be true, however weak, and you can claim all the aid that the prayer of Christ insures, and rejoice in the thought that such aid is almighty. Ker.
GOD has done more than manifest himself in Jesus Christ. He has done more than place upon the earth and before men his own living image, the type of sanctity and the model of life. Jesus Christ is not only God made man to spread the divine light upon men; he is God made man to conquer and efface in man moral evil, the fruit of the sin of man. He brings not only light and law, but pardon and salvation. And it is at the price of his own suffering that he brings these to them. He is the type of self-devotion at the same time as of sanctity. He has submitted to be a victim in order to be a saviour. The incarnation leads to the cross, and the cross to the redemption. And what other spectacle than that of God made man to constitute himself victim—made victim to become the Saviour—could have excited in the soul of mankind those outbursts of admiration, of respect and love, that ardent, invincible, and contagious faith of which the apostles and primitive Christians have left us the evidences and the example? It was requisite that the victim and the sacrifice should be equal to the work. That work was the Christian religion, that incomparable system of facts, dogmas, precepts, promises, which in the midst of doubts and controversies has for nineteen centuries afforded satisfaction and solution to all natural human aspirations. F. G.
15. To be kept in the world implies three things—to be engaged in its business, to suffer under its trials, to be exposed to its temptations and sins. To be kept from evil in the world means, to be engaged in the world’s business and have it rightly directed; to suffer under its trials and to be preserved from impatience; to be exposed to its temptations, and preserved from falling into sin. This should mark a Christian man in the world, that he should have a deeper view of what is to be aimed at in character, of what is meant by being kept from evil. It is not to be preserved from misfortune, or sickness, or reproach, or bereavement, but from sin. Let us fear nothing so much as sin; and feel that our life can aim at a true and noble end only when it breathes the air of this prayer of Christ. Ker.
The means we are to use that we may be kept of God from evil, Christ plainly intimates in verses 14 and 17: thy word. So the psalmist: “Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against thee.” J. G. B.
16. Repetitions in real earnest prayer are warranted by Christ’s example—here and afterward. It is vain repetitions, repeating the same words without thought or feeling, against which he warns. J. C. R.
17,19. Sanctify them through thy truth. Sanctify myself. The word sanctify carries the meaning which unites the two uses, of consecration to God. In them, this setting apart for him was a gradual process to be accomplished by the deeper drinking in of the truth, by the blows of affliction, and the purifying fire of the Spirit; in them it was strictly sanctification, or the making holy. But in him it was that pure and entire self-consecration by his submission to the Father’s will, the entire possession of his sinless humanity with the living, speaking truth of God, which should be the efficient cause of their sanctification and their pattern. A.
As the former prayer, “Keep them,” was negative, asking protection for them from the poisonous element which surrounded and pressed upon their renewed nature, so this prayer, “Sanctify them,” is positive, asking the advancement and completion of their begun sanctification. Through (or in) thy truth—God’s revealed truth, as the medium or element of sanctification. B.
The true law of every life is consecration to God; therefore Christ says, I consecrate myself; else he had not been a man in God’s idea of manhood—for the idea of man which God had been for ages laboring to give through a consecrated tribe and a consecrated nation to the world, was the idea of a being whose life-law is sacrifice, every act and every thought being devoted to God. Accordingly, this is the view which Christ himself gave of his own divine humanity. For their sakes I sanctify, i. e., consecrate or devote myself. F. W. R.
The priest of the new covenant thus offers to God, in his person, the whole of that new humanity which he represents in his sacrifice. De P.—For all his Church, and for every member of it, Jesus set himself apart, and consecrated himself at once as a priest to offer an efficacious sacrifice, and as a victim, chosen of God, yet self-doomed and self-consecrated, to be offered on the altar of the divine righteousness. What the apostle calls the “giving of himself for us,” seems to be precisely what our Lord here calls “sanctifying himself;” and the sanctifying of his people, which he here represents as the ultimate end of his sanctifying of himself, appears to include all that the apostle describes by “redeeming them from all iniquity, and purifying to himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.” T. Smith.
20,21. That they all may be one in us. The indwelling Spirit of the Father and the Son is the one perfect bond of union, knitting into a living unity, first, all believers among themselves; next, this unity into one still higher, with the Father and the Son. (Observe, that Christ never mixes himself up with his disciples as he associates himself with the Father, but says, “I in them and they in us.”)
That the world may believe. The grand impression upon the world at large, that the mission of Christ is divine, is to be made by the unity of his disciples. The Spirit of Christ, illuminating, transforming, and reigning in the hearts of the genuine disciples of Christ, drawing them to each other as members of one family, and prompting them to loving coöperation for the good of the world—this is what, when sufficiently glowing and extended, shall force conviction upon the world that Christianity is divine. Doubtless the more that differences among Christians disappear—the more they can agree even in minor matters—the impression upon the world may be expected to be greater. But it is not dependent upon this; for living and loving oneness in Christ is sometimes more touchingly seen even amid and in spite of minor differences, than where no such differences exist to try the strength of their deeper unity. Yet it is when “the Spirit shall be poured upon us from on high,” as a Spirit of truth and love, and upon all parts of the Christian territory alike, melting down differences and heart-burnings, kindling astonishment and shame at past unfruitfulness, drawing forth longings of catholic affection, and yearnings over a world lying in wickedness, embodying themselves in palpable forms and active measures—it is then that we may expect the effect here announced to be produced, and then it will be irresistible. Should not Christians ponder these things? “should not the same mind be in them which was also in Christ Jesus” about this matter? should not his prayer be theirs? B.
22. What glory is it which Christ has, and which he gives to us? It is this which he has just before said, that they all may be one, as the Father and I are one. This is the real, true mine of all divine blessings, of life, comfort, blessedness—if only we could believe it! But faith is not an idle, lazy thought—it is a living, earnest, comforting, and undoubting confidence of the heart in this excellent glory of ours, whereby we are made one thing with Christ, and through him with the Father also; so that just as little as Christ can be torn or separated from the Father, just so little is it possible that the Christian Church, and each individual member thereof, can be divided from him. Luther.
24. Hear this mighty word: I will, the Saviour says; not, I pray. This was the counsel adopted between the Father and the Son in the depths of eternity; this was the high end of the incarnation and death of the great Surety, that sinners should be saved. Therefore the Saviour says, This is my will, for thou hast loved me before the world was. In the relation of love which exists between me and thee in the inmost being of the Godhead, the salvation of sinners now rests as a right; therefore I will it! Thus the Saviour, in his prayer, looks into the depths of eternity both backward and forward. Thus his intercession reaches on into the time when the Shepherd will feed his sheep in heavenly pastures, and lead them forth beside the waters of eternal life. They shall behold his glory! Hoffacker.
They may behold. The open beholding which shall be coincident with our being changed into his perfect image. To behold is to see and partake—the very case supposes it. No mere spectator could see this glory. The most glorious part of this sight will be to behold the whole mystery of redemption unfolded in the glory of Christ’s person. A.
With me where I am. Heaven will be to be with him, forever—with him in a deeper and larger and more perfect sense than we ever can be here; having a deeper knowledge of him than is possible here, a clearer sight, a closer and more actual communion, larger receptions of his Spirit. Heaven will be to see more, and more constantly, the wonderful richness of his character; its tenderness and grandeur, its purity and holiness, its glory and beauty. Heaven will be to comprehend more entirely what it was that he did for us when he so loved us as to give himself for us; and what the suffering and the sin were from which his sinless suffering saved us. Heaven will be to be made like him, fashioned into that mysterious and most excellent living image. “We know not what we shall be, but we know that we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” Heaven is not, then, a mere appendage or supplement to this life. It is rather the perfecting and widening out of that life of Christ within the disciple, or of the disciple’s life with him—whichever way we express it, for it is really both—only in conditions of greater freedom and power. Once united in living sympathies and affections with him, so that we live for the same holy and blessed things for which he lives, heaven comes of course. F. D. H.
25. For each one there is nothing more establishing to spiritual peace than to be able to repeat after his Saviour, Righteous Father—i. e., to be able to see that the death of his flesh, the life of his Spirit, the abolishing of sin, the service of the living God, the appointment which separates us from the world and its pleasure, but gives us in return the glory of being heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ—to be able cordially to embrace the conviction that it is all of it founded on the righteousness of God. Rieger.
25,26. This incomparable prayer of consecration for his own, and for all mankind, is closed with the words, “O Holy Father, the world hath not known thee (lost in sin, it cannot know the Holy One); but I have known thee (the Holy One knows the Holy One); and these have known that thou hast sent me (they are, therefore, separated from the world of sin, which is estranged from the Holy God); and I have declared unto them thy name (have revealed unto them thee, not only as the Holy God, but as the Holy Father, with whom they stand in childlike communion), and will declare it further (all that had been revealed was but the germ of subsequent developments); that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them (that as they know thee more and more through the revelations of my Spirit, they may, in communion with me, learn more and more how thou lovest me and those that belong to me)." N.
How sublimely this prayer was realized in the history of the apostles, the Acts and the epistles abundantly illustrate. It was their common glory to believe that nothing could separate them from the love of God in Christ, that he, by his Spirit, was with them, and that they overcame all that opposed, through his help. The contrast between the dejected, faint-hearted, materializing Galilean fishermen and peasants of the gospels, and the heroic, spiritual confessors of Pentecost and after-times, is itself a miracle, great beyond all others. The illumination of soul, the grandeur of conception, the loftiness of aim, are a transformation as complete as the change from early twilight to noon; and find their only solution in the miraculous spiritual enlightenment from above which Jesus had promised to send them. G.
With this lofty thought the Redeemer closes his prayer for his disciples, and in them for his Church through all ages. He has compressed into the last moments given him for conversation with his own the most sublime and glorious sentiments ever uttered by mortal lips. But hardly has the sound of the last word died away, when he passes with the disciples over the brook Cedron to Gethsemane—and the bitter conflict draws on. The seed of the new world must be sown in death, that thence life may spring up. O.