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1 After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed: “Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. 2 For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. 3 Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. 4 I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. 5 And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began. 6 “I have revealed you to those whom you gave me out of the world. They were yours; you gave them to me and they have obeyed your word. 7 Now they know that everything you have given me comes from you. 8 For I gave them the words you gave me and they accepted them. They knew with certainty that I came from you, and they believed that you sent me. 9 I pray for them. I am not praying for the world, but for those you have given me, for they are yours. 10 All I have is yours, and all you have is mine. And glory has come to me through them. 11 I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one. (John 17:1-11 NIV)
My paternal grandfather led an interesting life. Carlos Valverde, Jr., never knew how to read until he was retired and attended night school to learn to read. By that time he had given up drinking and was re-married and had adopted a little girl with his new wife. He also took up the faith he had mocked in my grandmother. The first time I had seen my Dad cry was the day he was told they had divorced; and it took some time before he forgave his father and once again welcomed him into our family. He loved me and when I married attended our wedding and loved Nellie and our daughters very much. One night we had to stay over his house and once the lights were out and we were trying to sleep I heard him talking in a very loud voice! I wondered who or what he was about and Nellie said, "Popó is praying!" And so he was. I know God heard him quite clearly as did his neighbors. He mentioned all family members by name and lifted them up. He prayed for many things and many people; and although it made me proud I felt a bit funny overhearing what I knew as his private time to pray to his Heavenly Father. I was blessed and thankful. As we should be having heard the prayer Jesus prayed for you and me.
This prayer is the longest recorded prayer of Jesus in all four Gospels, and reading it feels less like studying a text and more like pressing your ear to a door that has been left slightly ajar. We are, in a sense, overhearing something we were not meant to hear — or perhaps something we were meant to hear more than almost anything else.
The setting is the night before the crucifixion. Jesus has washed the disciples’ feet. He has spoken the farewell discourses — those long, luminous chapters of John 14 through 16 filled with promises about the Spirit, about the vine and the branches, about a peace the world cannot give. And now, as the evening draws toward its terrible conclusion, he looks toward heaven and prays.
Not to the crowd. Not for their benefit. He is talking to his Father. And John lets us listen.
Theologians have called this passage the High Priestly Prayer — because what Jesus is doing here is what a great high priest does: standing between God and the people, interceding, presenting them, asking on their behalf. It is the most intimate window we have into the inner life of Jesus in all of Scripture. And what we find there, when we lean in and listen, is something that should stop us in our tracks during this season of Easter.
We find that Jesus was praying for us. Specifically, personally, urgently — on the night he was handed over to suffer and die. We were on his mind and on his lips before the cross. And the risen, ascended Christ, Hebrews tells us, is still interceding. The prayer did not end. It continues.
Let us listen to what he was saying.
Jesus opens the prayer with words that would have chilled the air in that upper room if the disciples had understood them fully: “Father, the hour has come.”
Throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus has spoken of “his hour” — the moment toward which his entire ministry has been moving. At the wedding in Cana, when his mother pressed him to act, he said, “My hour has not yet come.” When the crowds tried to seize him in Jerusalem, John notes that no one could lay a hand on him because his hour had not yet come. The hour is the cross. The hour is the passion. The hour is the thing that everything else in his ministry has been pointing toward.
And now it has arrived. And Jesus does not flinch from it. He does not pray to be spared from it — at least not here, not in this prayer. He prays into it. “Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you.”
This is a staggering reframe. The cross, which looks to every human eye like the ultimate moment of shame and defeat, is the moment Jesus calls his glorification. Not in spite of the suffering, but through it. The glory of God — the full, unveiled, radiant expression of who God is — will be displayed in the death and resurrection of Jesus more completely than in any burning bush, any parted sea, any fire on any mountain.
And this is exactly where Eastertide stands. We are the people who have seen the other side of the hour. We know what happened after the cross. We know that the tomb is empty, that the stone was rolled away, that the risen Christ appeared to Mary in the garden and to the disciples behind locked doors and to five hundred people at once. We are the people for whom the hour has already passed — and we know what it produced.
The glory came. It came through the very thing that looked like the end. And the Christ who prays this prayer is the same Christ who now sits at the right hand of the Father, the hour behind him, the glory permanent and undiminished.
Then Jesus says something that should rewrite the way we think about eternal life entirely: “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
In much of our popular Christian imagination, eternal life is about duration. It is about what happens after we die. It is the life that begins when this one ends — the endless continuation of existence on the other side of the grave. And that is not entirely wrong. But Jesus here defines eternal life in a way that has almost nothing to do with length and everything to do with depth.
Eternal life is knowing God. The Greek word for know here is not merely intellectual knowledge — knowing about, the way you know about a historical figure. It is the intimate, relational, personal knowing of one who has been met, encountered, loved. It is the kind of knowing that changes the one who knows. It is the knowledge of a child who knows a parent, a friend who knows a friend, a beloved who knows the beloved.
This means that eternal life is not something that begins when we die. It is something that begins the moment we come to know the only true God through Jesus Christ. We are not waiting for eternal life. We are already in it. The quality of life that belongs to the age to come — the life of unobstructed intimacy with the Father — is already available, already present, already being lived by every person in whom the Spirit of the risen Christ dwells.
Eastertide is the season to reclaim this. The resurrection is not merely a promise about what happens to our bodies after death. It is the announcement that the life of the age to come has broken into the present age right now. When Jesus walked out of the tomb, he did not simply survive death. He inaugurated a new kind of life — the life of God himself, available to every person who believes.
The invitation of this passage is to live as people who already possess what the world is still searching for. Not to wait for eternal life. To receive it. To inhabit it. Today.
The prayer now turns — and this is the moment that should make every one of us catch our breath. Jesus says: “I pray for them.”
Not for the world in general. Not for an abstraction. For them — the ones the Father has given him, the ones who have received his words, the ones who have come to know with certainty that he came from the Father. He is praying for his people. For the community of those who belong to him. For the church — that small, frightened, deeply imperfect group of people gathered in an upper room in Jerusalem who have no idea what the next twelve hours will bring.
And then he says something that ought to silence every anxiety about our standing before God: “All I have is yours, and all you have is mine.”
Do you hear what Jesus is claiming in that sentence? He is describing a total, unreserved, mutual belonging between himself and the Father. Everything the Father has belongs to the Son. Everything the Son has belongs to the Father. It is the language of the most complete union imaginable. And the people he is praying for — these imperfect, wavering, often-confused disciples — are held within that union. They are given by the Father to the Son. They are the Father’s, and they are the Son’s, simultaneously and completely.
There is no more secure place in the universe to be.
The prayer then narrows to a specific, urgent request: “Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one.”
Jesus is about to leave them. He knows it. He knows what is coming — the arrest, the trial, the scattering, the grief that will hollow them out. And so he asks the Father for two things: protection and unity. Keep them. Hold them together.
These two requests are not incidental. They go to the heart of what the church needs in every generation. We need protection — not from all hardship, but from the things that would destroy us: the lies that make us doubt God’s goodness, the fears that make us forget whose we are, the pressures that would pull us away from the one in whom we live. And we need unity — not the unity of uniformity, not the peace of a group that has ironed out every disagreement, but the deep, organic, Spirit-wrought unity that mirrors the unity of the Father and the Son.
He prayed for both. And the risen, ascended Christ — Hebrews 7:25 tells us — always lives to make intercession. This prayer did not expire at Gethsemane. It continues, right now, at the right hand of the Father. Jesus is still praying for his people. He is still asking the Father to protect them, to hold them, to keep them one.
He is still praying for you.
For Reflection
John 17 is sometimes called the Holy of Holies of the New Testament — the innermost room, the place where the curtain is pulled aside and we see, as clearly as we can see anywhere in Scripture, the heart of Jesus.
And what we find there is this: on the night he was betrayed, with the cross hours away and the full weight of what was coming already pressing down on him, Jesus was thinking about us. He was praying for our protection. He was praying for our unity. He was placing us into the hands of his Father with a confidence that the Father would hold what the Son had given him.
That is the word of this passage for Eastertide: you are held. Not by your own grip on faith, not by the strength of your own devotion, not by how well you have performed the Christian life this week. You are held by the intercession of the risen Christ, who gave you to the Father and asked the Father to keep you, and whose prayer has never been denied.
Eternal life — the real thing, the deep thing, the knowing of the only true God — is already yours. It began not at death but at faith. And it will not end, because the one who secured it is seated at the right hand of the Father, alive forever, interceding always.
You were on his lips on the night he suffered. You are on his lips still.
PRAYER: Holy Father, we receive with wonder the truth that your Son prayed for us before the cross and prays for us still — and we rest today in the protection of your name and the unity of your love. Amen.
Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Spend five minutes this week simply resting in the fact that Jesus is interceding for you right now — not striving in prayer, not composing the right words, just sitting quietly in the knowledge that you are held, prayed for, and kept by name.
I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me. Alleluia. Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.
Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.
