John 17:1- 5 We now have John's record of Jesus' final prayer for
His disciples. Every petition in this prayer meet all the contextual and
heart-desires that He had previously talked about for answered prayer. Yet we
will find that some of His prayer has not been answered. In many respects,
Jesus' prayer is as much a sermon for His disciples as it is a petition to the
Father.
First, Jesus speaks of glory. In this
petition, Jesus asks the Father to glorify Him, the Son, that He may in turn
glorify His Father. And the nature of this glory is very specifically defined.
Glory will accrue to the Father through the Son in the act of giving eternal life
to those whom the Father has given to the Son, and the mechanism by which they
are given eternal life is that they will know the Father and the Son. Jesus
speaks of the glory He had with the Father before the world was. That would
have been a different sort of glory because it could not have involved giving
eternal life to people who were not yet created.
In his essay title "The Weight of
Glory", C.S. Lewis expounds on what glory means. The title of the essay is in itself a bit of wordplay, because the
Greek word for glory means weight. What does weight have to do with God's
glory? It seems to be that the presence of God's manifested approval is heavy.
It weighs on us heavily. It is not something that God, or that we, take
lightly. So Jesus had the Father's approval before the world was created. And
Jesus now has an even greater weight of God's approval in that He has
accomplished the work that the Father has sent Him to do, which is to bring
those who receive Him into knowledge of the Father. And it appears when He says
that they know Him, it is not book-learning or head-knowledge, but the biblical
since of knowing, that is, by intimate contact and interaction. This is the
glory that Jesus asks the Father to manifest, and that implicitly Jesus wants
the disciples to understand. He will be glorified in their close relationship
to the Father.
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