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The setting for our reading is the Last Supper. Jesus has tenderly taught his disciples about what is going to unfold. He has celebrated the Passover meal, but even as he has done that, dark forces have been marshalling. Wicked schemes of wicked men, manipulated by the demonic powers, are baying for his blood.
In the next few hours, Jesus will be betrayed, abandoned, arrested, tried, humiliated, beaten, and murdered. Jesus knows what is waiting for him. He knows he is about to duel with death. He will soon enter the heart of darkness in order to bring heaven's light.
The first thing we see is that Jesus turns to prayer, and in doing so offers us a model for prayer.
"When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven and prayed, 'Father...'" (John 17:1)
In front of Jesus' eyes are the remains of the Passover meal — the lamb and the bitter herbs, tokens of the suffering and sacrifice he will endure as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. In front of his eyes are the remains of bread and wine, emblems of his body soon to be broken. In front of his eyes are the disciples, all of whom he knows will let him down, deny him, and run from him just when he needs them most. And in front of his eyes is an empty chair where Judas was — Judas, who has gone out to betray him.
But rather than roll his eyes in protest or drop his eyes in sadness, Jesus lifts his eyes. And in a split second, heaven joins with earth.
Heaven, of course, is not "up there" — there is no three-tier universe. To lift his eyes is idiomatic for orientation, for a posture. He takes his eyes off the problem and looks to the One who can help him with the problem.
Prayer is orientation. Prayer is lifting our eyes heavenward, Godward, helpward. Prayer puts things in perspective. Prayer puts the matter into God's hands. Prayer is, if you like, the first emergency service. Prayer brings omnipotence to our own sense of impotence.
"I lift my eyes up to the mountains — where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth." (Psalm 121)
Whatever issues, pressures, problems, difficulties you may be facing at the moment — whether family, work, finances, health, unfulfilled desires, fears, stresses, or disappointments — the first thing we do is lift up our eyes and look to the heavens. Look to the King of heaven. Look to the One who can help.
Jesus' prayer begins with himself, but quickly moves to praying for others. There are three groups covered in this so-called high priestly prayer of Jesus:
It's amazing to think that two millennia ago, at the Last Supper, when Jesus lifted up his eyes and his heart and his voice, he prayed for you and me. We were part of his prayer. He carried us on his heart and his lips to the Father.
What also stood out this week is that the prayer for himself is the shortest part — only about 20% of the total. The rest is for the disciples and for others. The heart of Jesus is always turned outward. That's the whole point of the drama and the death he is about to face — it's all for others.
I used to discipline myself in praying for others through the rosary — ten beads, then one, five sets, then finishing at the cross. In the Catholic tradition, they often pray ten Hail Marys to one Our Father. I tried to discipline myself to pray for ten other people and then one for myself, because my ego and my flesh and my selfishness would so easily just want to talk about me. I don't think the Lord minds us talking about ourselves to him, but it was a discipline I tried to instill — and maybe I need to return to it.
In our prayer, we need to widen our prayers and fold others into them. We approach him with our own issues, and then we fold in others.
Jesus has spent hours teaching the disciples at the Last Supper. The discourse from John chapters 13 to 17 is the longest teaching segment in all the Gospels — it takes 20 minutes to read. But when he prays, he prays pithy, to-the-point prayers. The whole prayer can be read in three minutes.
I think this is in part because Jesus lived in constant communion with the Father — always, as it were, clocking in and communing with him. This is his longest recorded prayer, at the most critical moment of his life, and yet it is not eloquent, not verbose, not repetitious.
"We don't approach God with length of prayer and strength of vocabulary." — C.S. Lewis
It's not "O Lord of years, Potentate of time, Creator of the rolling spheres, ineffably sublime." He just gets straight to it: Father.
For years I felt a failure at prayer. I used to think that unless I prayed for hours on my knees, unless I prayed longer and better prayers, I was somehow failing. When you are ordained in the Church of England, the bishops ask, "Will you be diligent in prayer?" And you're not allowed to ask what "diligent" means! I'd read about great saints like John Wesley who prayed two hours every morning from 4 a.m. I tried that too — but I would always fall asleep, and wake up with a stiff neck, sore knees, and dribble in my ear.
But Jesus prays short, snappy, to-the-point prayers. The word prayer in Hebrew and Greek simply means ask. Jesus prays without a warm-up. There's no preamble, no dilly-dallying. He gets straight to a series of specific requests, confident that his Father listens, receives, and will respond rightly.
If prayer is the first response, Father is the first word. It frames the whole prayer.
Jesus addresses God almost exclusively as Father — over a hundred times in John's Gospel alone. And the marvel of the Christian faith is that Jesus invites us into the same intimate, familial relationship with the Father that he has. "When you pray, say, 'Our Father.'" My Father is your Father. This is the scandal of intimacy with God.
I was once at a conference, and a friend, Pete Hughes, came up and said, "Hi, Si." Someone next to him objected — "You can't call him that, it's disrespectful!" But Pete's a friend. Pete can call me what he likes.
In the Orthodox Jewish tradition, some won't even say "God" — they call him Hashem, "the Name," for fear of tainting it with unclean lips. I love that sense of reverence and holiness. But the extraordinary miracle of Christianity is that through Christ we get to call him not merely "the Name" — though he is Lord, God, sovereign, omnipotent — we get to call him Father.
This is the key to prayer. We're not trying to be heard by a distant and indifferent deity. We're not presenting a petition to a preoccupied Prime Minister. We are coming home — home to our Father, our beloved Abba, who is ready and waiting and thrilled that we are taking time out with him.
The second focus of this prayer is the beauty of the relationship between the Father and the Son.
"Father... glorify your son, that your son may glorify you... I have brought you glory. Now glorify me." (John 17:1, 5)
Four times Jesus mentions glory — doxa — meaning to honor, to praise, to clothe in splendor, to take pride in. What we see is a beautiful, mutual, reciprocal honoring: Honor me that I might honor you; I am honoring you that you might honor me with the glory I had with you at the beginning.
God the Father speaks directly only three times in the New Testament:
Their whole relationship is about mutual honoring — deferring to the other, loving the other, shining on the other, promoting the other, lifting up the other. The Father honors the Son who honors the Father who honors the Son. This is the nature and character of their relationship, and I think it's a profound insight into what prayer is about: as we honor God, he blesses us.
This is also helpful for us today, on Father's Day. What does it mean to be a father? What does it mean to be a child in relationship with one's father? The ideal, though we all fall short, is here: mutual honor between Father and Son.
I didn't always honor my own father. As a teenager and young man I struggled with him — psychologists call it a normal part of individuation. I wanted an action man, not an academic man; I wanted him to teach me how to box, not hug me. But the older I get, the more I see how special he was, and all that he gave me. One time, when I got in trouble at school and the police were called, my dad stormed in, went all legal on them, and I watched the headmaster shrink back.
As with Mother's Day, Father's Day can be triggering. It can bring up:
I wonder what my own sons will remember of their childhood — was I too sharp, too preoccupied, too often away, too demanding?
One of the greatest speeches in movie history is in Gladiator, when Commodus speaks to his father, Marcus Aurelius, after learning the empire will not be his:
"I searched the faces of the gods for ways to please you and make you proud. One kind word, one full hug, where you pressed me to your chest and held me tight — that would have been like the sun on my heart for a thousand years. What is it in me that you hate so much? All I have ever wanted is to live up to you, Caesar. Father."
And the emperor responds, "Son, your failure as a son is my failure as a father." A terrible response — but whoever wrote it understands the pain of a relationship lacking honor and blessing.
Here is the good news, saints: even if our relationship with our earthly father was difficult or non-existent, God wills to be a perfect Father to us. Our own fathers at their worst bear no resemblance whatsoever to God. And our own fathers at their best are just a dim echo of the glory the Father wants to honor us with.
Jesus came and died to introduce us to the Father. Jesus sends his Spirit to bind us to the Father and reveal him to us as Abba. By the Spirit, through Christ, the Father draws near, embraces us, hugs us, fills us with his love, makes us secure, gives us honor, and lifts our heads.
"God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him." — John Piper
He is a God of honor who wants to honor us — the lifter of our heads. And we respond with honor.
Preparing this talk last night, I was reminded of my dear old dad's Bible — an old King James, with interleaved blank pages filled with his handwritten notes. I sensed the Lord prompt me to go and look at what my father had written on this passage, John 17.
When I opened it, I noticed the page was falling apart. I think the Lord wanted to say two things through that.
First, maybe in your life there is a tear — between you and your father, between you and your children, or even between you and God in your prayer life. Today, on Father's Day, God wants to repair the tear.
Second, this page was falling apart exactly here because this is where my dad went often. He lost his own father to pneumonia on his sixteenth birthday, and limped through life because of that loss. Yet here, with Jesus in his pain — lifting up his eyes, lifting up his voice, receiving honor from his Father — I believe my dad came often to nestle with the Lord, to honor him and be honored by him.
God wants us to come often to him as Father, and to know that love and that glory he longs to give us.
Amen.
