John 17:1-8

08/08/10
John 17:1-8
Hudson UMC

For the last several weeks, in fact, since right after Easter, we have been in the middle of John’s account of the Last Supper. Jesus is gathered together with His disciples, sharing the Passover meal and giving some final instruction. This one part of this one evening takes up a five full chapters. As we arrive in chapter seventeen, we might wonder if we are ever going to get past this seemingly endless stream of talking. Indeed, we will. In fact, once this prayer of Jesus is over, once this chapter is completed, the action will pick up tremendously. In fact, it almost feels as if we get caught up in the hustle and bustle of the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus. However, before all that takes place, Jesus prays. This is the longest prayer in the entire Bible and is commonly known as the “high priestly” prayer of Christ, where He speaks to God on our behalf. It is really a very exciting chapter, because it gives us a window into the relationship between the Father and the Son that we do not get anywhere else.

If you get nothing else out of this sermon and this passage, I hope that you are more and more convinced that it is impossible to completely separate Jesus from the Father. According to Jesus, He and the Father are joined with an unbreakable bond. He basically says this over and over again in this passage, but in different ways, looking at the same reality from different angles. I want to lift up three important ways that Jesus points out that He is utterly tied to the Father.

First, Jesus says, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him.” Jesus is saying that, when He is glorified, God is glorified. Some people will claim with great conviction that the man Jesus who walked the earth two thousand years ago never claimed to be God and that this was something that the church read into the simple life and teaching of Christ. There are only two ways that we can come to the conclusion that Jesus did not think He was God. The first is by doing what a group of people called the Jesus Seminar have done, which is go through the gospels and decide what Jesus certainly said, what He may have said, what He probably didn’t say and what He surely didn’t say. The problem with this way of doing things is that the scholars began by presupposing a radical separation between Jesus and the faith of the church and so they eliminated everything that Jesus said that might go against that presupposition. The other way that we might miss Jesus identifying Himself with God would be if we did not understand the full implications of what He said in places like this.

You see, Jesus is saying that, if God glorifies Him, He will glorify the Father. He is not saying this like you and I might. You and I might say, “God, if you make me popular, or if you make people listen to me, or if you give me lots of influence with people, I will let people know about you.” This way of speaking is almost like saying to God, “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours,” as if God needed us to help Him out or else He would be in trouble. Jesus is saying that the glory of His name is absolutely tied up with the glory of God. If Jesus’ name is not glorified, it is not possible for God’s name to be glorified. More specifically, He says that it is because He has authority to give eternal life to human beings. By people like you and me coming to know God, and receiving eternal life, the world comes to know that God is not just a figment of our imagination but is real, living and powerful and has transformed our lives. But God did not do that in some way other than in and through Christ. It is not as though Jesus is simply a messenger that we listened to and met a God that we could have met some other way. In and through Christ we came face to face with God Himself. When we look deeply into the face of Christ we see the face of God. When we give praise to God, we do not give praise to some kind of abstract God, whatever that might be, but give praise to the one who has come to us as a human being, we give praise to the Father through Christ and in the Holy Spirit.

The next thing that Jesus says that binds Him to the Father is about how He understands salvation and eternal life. “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” This is really important for us to grasp. The question can be asked and has been asked, “What exactly is eternal life.” Throughout the gospel of John, Jesus has spoken about eternal life many times, but we might still walk away from the text confused, wondering if that is it. After all, Jesus has mostly spoken in such a way as to identify eternal life with believing in Him. Here we have Him saying that what eternal life is, is to know the one true God and Jesus Christ whom that one God has sent. So, we are supposed to know God, but doesn’t that seem a bit oversimplified? What about living a transformed life, what about having compassion on the poor, what about all the other things we talk about in the church and society? Doesn’t it seem that just knowing God is a little too easy, a little too simple?

It might, but we need to remember that the idea of “knowing” in the Bible is considerably more potent than it often is in modern society. When most of us talk about knowing something, we think in terms of information, knowing about something. We think about knowledge in terms of giving and receiving information that we can take or leave. When we learn about something we are not fundamentally changed. The knowledge can go into our heads and leave our hearts and lives alone.

This is not the case with knowing God. In the Old Testament, to “know” someone did not just mean that you met them, shook their hand, and made some small talk. It meant that you were united to them, that you had intimate, personal knowledge of them in such a way that you were forever bound to them. It is because of this that the Bible uses the word “know” to talk about marriage relationships. To truly know God is to be bound to Him in a deep and personal way. We need to remember what Jesus said in the very heart of this time with His disciples. He told them that, as those who followed Him, they were bound up with Him like branches on a vine. To know Christ is to be bound to Him so profoundly that you cannot be separated from Him. To know the one true God is not something that can be done in the abstract, it is not something that we can do without receiving the Holy Spirit, the very presence and being of God, into our lives and being grafted into Christ by that same Spirit.

When we understand the need to “know” God in this way, everything begins to make sense. We begin to see that all the different facets of the Christian life that we want to make sure are not ignored and left aside are caught up together in this knowing of God. Our knowing of God is not static, lifeless information, but dynamic, powerful, and personal interaction with the divine. When we receive the Holy Spirit into our very lives, the holiness of God presses up against our own unholiness and we begin to see that our lives are not all they could and should be, that we have not been as faithful as we are called to be, that we have ignored and even been a part of the oppression that reigns in so much of contemporary society. We begin to have our hearts and lives molded into the very image of the heart and life of Christ, where we begin to see through His eyes and feel with His heart. By being bound up with Christ, we do not become any less who we are, but more who we were meant to be than ever before because now our hardness of heart has been overcome by the love and mercy of God that has replaced our hearts of stone with hearts of flesh that can receive and return the love of God.

There is one more point I want to draw out in regard to what Jesus says in this passage. He said, “I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world.” It is extremely important that we understand that Jesus is the one who makes the name of God known to us. Again, when the Bible speaks of us knowing the “name” of God, it does not mean simply that we know a word by which to call God, but that we actually have personal and intimate knowledge of God. Jesus is saying that it is He who has made God’s name known among the people of the world. What we need to understand is that this is an absolute claim.

It might help us to get our heads around what Jesus is saying if we take a moment and consider some of the things that He is not saying. Jesus is not saying that God is someone who lives inside of each of us simply because we are human beings and that He has simply awakened us to the potential that each of us already have and so is a savior in this way, because He has helped us to help ourselves. He is not saying that God is some immanent being that is so close to each of us that we have an intuitive knowledge of God already and that He just helped us to make sense out of the religious experience we have already had. Jesus is not the incarnation of our highest ideals of humanity, nor is He the incarnation of our moral code that we already believe. He is the incarnation of God, and, as the presence of God in our midst, turns our world upside down and teaches us what we never would have been able to teach ourselves.

A particular story from the Old Testament has been laying heavily on my heart recently. There is a moment in the life of Abraham where he is commanded by God to go to a mountain in the land of Moriah and sacrifice his son Isaac, the one that God had promised to give him and Sarah, and whose birth was an utter miracle. To the horror of many modern readers, Abraham obeys and takes Isaac on the journey. However, right before Abraham followed through, while the knife was raised, God stopped him and provided a ram to be sacrificed instead. There are many aspects to this story, several of which are fundamental to the development of the Jewish understanding of God which is so important to us as Christians, but the one that I think is the very most important in light of all that God has done, and the most important for us to understand today is the fact that Abraham did not have anything better to offer than his son. If Abraham were to think of what he could offer to God, nothing was dearer to him than his son, born to him in his old age and bearing the promise of God. And yet, when God interrupted Abraham and provided a substitute, it is as if God was saying to Abraham, “Even the best you have is not good enough. In fact, nothing that you come up with can satisfy me. However, I will not abandon you because of this, but I will provide a sacrifice of my choosing. Because it comes from me, I will accept it.”

When we encounter Jesus, we see that God is not interested in what we think is the best we can offer. It isn’t about us coming up with the great sacrifice, the great gift, the great and impressive donation. Instead, He provides for us, He spells out the terms of our relationship and, when we can’t live up to the standards that God Himself has laid out for us, which we can’t, He provides a substitute in Jesus and takes our place, offering Himself up for us and our salvation.

What does this have to do with Jesus revealing the name of God to us? It has everything to do with it, because in Jesus we see the very face of God and it is a face that we have not seen anywhere else and, indeed, can not see anywhere else. We see the face of a God who takes our ways of doing things, shows us that they are not sufficient, and then takes our place so that He would not have to be without us. We see a God whose mercy and compassion are not at all like we expect but are far greater than we would ever have dared to dream.

This is the very core of the Gospel. As Jesus Himself has said, “This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” We have been given to Jesus Christ and empowered by the very power of the Holy Spirit. I don’t know how often we really allow the absolute power of this idea sink in and change our lives. Do we really live from day to day in the knowledge and joy that the God of the universe, who has created everything that we can see and everything that we can’t, has not remained apart from us but has come among us as one of us and one with us, all at tremendous cost to Himself? He didn’t have to do that, but He did. God has existed since eternity past and lived for quite a long time before He chose to create the universe and people to live in it. God could have gone on forever without ever creating human beings like you and me, but He did create us for no other reason than that He wanted to, that He did not want to be God forever by Himself, but wanted to share His eternal and joyful being with you and me.

We always need to remember the fact that we do not live in a necessary world, that things could have been quite different than they are, that they might not have been at all, and yet they do exist and God does interact with us and make us His own. Just as there is nothing about us and about this created universe in which we live that could have forced God to create it, there is nothing that could ever have forced God to become incarnate, to come among us, to live, suffer and die, just for us, people that, strictly speaking, God does not need, but that He loves. Nothing we have done or could do could ever tie God’s hands, could ever make Him do something for us. This makes the mercy and compassion of God all the more glorious and amazing. Jesus did not have to come, but He did, God did not have to take on human flesh and live in the pain and limitations of this world, but He did. Certainly God, who is immortal and can do anything He wants to do and does not have to do anything He doesn’t want to do, did not have to die, but He did. It wasn’t something God did because He had to, but because He wanted to, because He loves us that much, that He was willing to put His very self on the line for us and our salvation.

This is how much our God loves us. What greater joy could there be than the fact that we, though so little and insignificant in the comic view of things, are the beloved of God the almighty? What more can we ask than that God has entered into our suffering, taken it upon Himself, and promised that the pain of this life will be done away with someday and that we will dwell with Him in a new heaven and new earth forever, continually being amazed at the riches of the depths of God? Let us encourage one another and pray that God would impress Himself upon us so fully and so consistently that we would live day by day in the knowledge that God has loved us more than He loves Himself. Let us pray.

AMEN