Dove Sermons

Sermon based on John 17:1-11

It’s after the meal. The bread has been broken, the cup has been passed, and Judas has already slipped out into the night. Jesus has been talking for chapters reassuring, preparing, promising. And then, without warning, he stops talking to them and starts talking for them. He lifts his eyes toward heaven and prays. Out loud. With every one of them sitting right there, listening to every word.

Think about that for a moment. This is not the Garden of Gethsemane scene from Matthew or Mark, where Jesus goes off alone, falls on his face, and prays so hard he sweats while the disciples fall asleep. This is a table. A meal. These are people who have spent three years together, and now their rabbi, their teacher, their friend, is praying over them in plain hearing. Every word meant for God’s ears is also falling on theirs.

What does it do to you to overhear someone pray for you? Not talk about you… pray for you. There is something deeply intimate about it. It strips away every performance. When someone prays for you, you hear what they truly believe about you, what they actually want for you. You hear their heart.

And this is the heart of Jesus.

He opens with a word that speaks to the moment: “Father, the hour has come.”

In John’s gospel, “the hour” is a phrase you hear from the very beginning. At the wedding in Cana, Jesus says, “My hour has not yet come.” When the crowds try to arrest him, we’re told, “no one laid a hand on him, because his hour had not yet come.” Over and over, that phrase appears as a kind of waiting — a slow build toward something enormous. And now, at the table, Jesus says it plainly: the hour has come.

He is not running from it. He is not bargaining or asking for a different path. He is, in fact, asking for what is about to happen… the betrayal, the trial, the cross, to be understood for what it really is. He asks that in the horror of what’s coming, God would be made known.

That is what glory means in John’s gospel. Not brightness or spectacle or divine fireworks. Glory is the way God gets revealed to human beings. It is what happens when the invisible God becomes visible. And Jesus is saying: what you are about to witness, this thing that looks like failure and defeat and death, is actually the moment when God is most fully made known.

That is a radical claim.

We have a complicated relationship with the word “glory.” It tends to call up images of power… thunderclouds, armies, gold, triumph. The Psalms are full of it. The prophets can barely contain it. And there are certainly moments in the gospels where divine power is unmistakable. At the transfiguration, Jesus shines like the sun. At the resurrection, the stone rolls back. At the ascension, he is lifted into the clouds.

But in John’s gospel, the glory of Jesus is focused on something different. John gives us the first sign of Jesus’ glory at a wedding in Cana, where Jesus quietly turns water into wine… not to impress anyone, but because a family would have been humiliated without it. And John gives us the last great sign of Jesus’ glory before the crucifixion when Jesus calls Lazarus out of the tomb because two sisters were devastated by grief.

In both cases, what’s being revealed is not just power. It is the direction in which that power moves. It moves toward people. It moves toward need. It moves toward love.

And when we get to the cross, which is what this prayer is anticipating, John makes no mention of the earthquake, no tearing of the temple curtain, no saints rising from their tombs. The other gospels use those signs to frame the crucifixion as a divine event. John doesn’t. Because in John’s gospel, the cross itself is the glory. The cross is what God looks like when God stops being abstract and starts being present in the specific, costly, unreserved love of a man dying for the people he loves.

“It is finished,” Jesus will say from the cross in John 19. The Greek word for “it is finished” is tetelestai, the same root as the word used in this prayer when Jesus says he has “finished the work” God gave him to do. The cross is not a detour from the mission. It is the central component of it. It is the moment the glory lands.

In the middle of this prayer, Jesus gives us one of the simplest definitions of eternal life in all of scripture. He says: “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” (17:3)

That’s it. That’s the definition.

He’s not speaking about a destination. Jesus isn’t offering an afterlife benefit package. It’ not even an escape plan from this world into some better one. Eternal life, as spoken about in this prayer, is knowing God. It is being in relationship with the one who made you, through the one who revealed him, Jesus Christ.

Now, when John’s gospel uses the word “k-n-o-w,” it does not mean what we usually mean by it. It is not intellectual. You cannot know God in the sense Jesus means here by passing an exam or reciting the right words. In the world of the Gospel of John, to “know” someone is to be bound to them. It is the knowledge that comes through proximity, through faithfulness, through love over time. Again, it’s about relationship.

It is the knowledge a parent has of their child. It is the knowledge a person has of a friend they’ve kept through grief and joy and years. It is experiential, relational, and ongoing.

Which means that eternal life, the kind Jesus is talking about, is already available. It starts now. Not when you die. Now. The moment you begin to know God, you have begun to live the life that does not end.

We have too often used “eternal life” as a way of tolerating the present; as if this life is just the waiting room, and the real thing starts later. But Jesus is saying something almost exactly the opposite. The life of abiding in God (there’s that word abiding again), of knowing God, of being caught up in the love between the Father and the Son… that begins at the moment of faith. You are not waiting to live. You are already living it, if you are in relationship with God.

There’s a strange phrase in verse 2 that deserves attention. Jesus says that God has given him “authority over all people”; the word translated into people here in Greek is sarkos, which is broader than just human beings. It is the word for creaturely, embodied, finite existence. Everything that has flesh. Everything that lives and breathes and is mortal.

The scope of that statement is staggering. And the purpose of that authority is not control, it is to give life. Authority over all life, in order to give eternal life. The power Jesus holds is not the power to dominate. It is the power to restore. The power to bring into relationship what had become estranged.

And the object of that restoration is not just us. It is the whole created order… all creation, that God loves and refuses to abandon.

There is another moment in this prayer I want to home in on. Toward the end of this section of text, Jesus says: “And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world.” (17:11)

He is already speaking in the past tense about something that hasn’t happened yet. He is so certain of what is coming, so completely surrendered to it, that from where he stands in prayer, the cross and resurrection and ascension are already done. And the disciples, the ones sitting right there at the table, are already alone.

They don’t know that yet. They don’t know what the next 72 hours are going to look like. They have no previous example to learn from for what’s coming. And Jesus knows that. And he prays for them anyway. He prays not just for the eleven at the table, but, as the prayer continues, for everyone who will come to believe through their witness… which is to say, he prays for us.

He prays that we would be protected. That we would be unified. That we would know the love the Father has for the Son, and that this love would live in us.

What does it mean to know that Jesus prayed for you? Not in theory. In fact. At a table, on the last night before his death, with everything on the line; he prayed for you, in the sense that he prayed for all who would come after. You were on his heart before you existed. How does that make you feel? What does that stir in you, that Jesus would pray for you?

The prayer ends, at least in our lectionary passage, with this: “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”

The unity Jesus prays for is not institutional. He is praying that the love between the Father and the Son… that original, eternal, life giving love that existed before the world was made, would be the same love that holds us together as his people.

That is a different kind of unity. It is not agreement on every principle. It is a shared center. A common life. A love that does not require everyone to be the same, but does require everyone to be bound to the same God.

And here is where this prayer becomes our commission rather than just our comfort.

Jesus is no longer in the world. The incarnation has done its work. The Word became flesh, walked among us, died, rose, ascended. And now, according to Jesus himself — “they are in the world.” We are in the world. The mission continues, but the primary agent of the mission has changed. We are not waiting for Jesus to come back and do the work. We are the people sent to do the work while we wait.

That is not a small thing. That is the whole center of Pentecost, the reason the Spirit was sent, the reason the church exists at all. Remember from two weeks ago, Jesus said in John 14, “the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.” Greater works. He meant that. He was not being symbolic. Jesus prayed that we would work and live together in a spirit of love.

When Hurricane Helene tore through western North Carolina in the fall of 2024, it left the city of Asheville without running water for 53 days. Roads were gone. The infrastructure that held a community together was simply not there anymore. But something else emerged in its place.

A ministry called Asheville Buncombe Community Christian Ministry, an interfaith organization supported by over 300 congregations of nearly every denomination, happened to have just moved into a new building with a large warehouse they hadn’t yet figured out what to do with. Within days of the storm, that warehouse became the only functioning distribution hub in the county, with churches of every stripe showing up together to work. Southern Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans, LDS volunteers… all of them side by side, hauling supplies and clearing debris.

One man who grew up in Asheville and was cutting through fallen trees was interviewed and said it simply: “We may have our feuds, but when something like this happens, all of that goes away”. One of the churches that joined in to help was a brand new church plant whose official launch had been scheduled for that same month put out a statement that said: the storm postponed our launch, but it couldn’t stop us from being the church and loving our city.

That is what Jesus is praying for at that table. Not that we would agree on everything. That we would show up together when it matters.

So what does this mean for us? It’s a call to unity, to come together around a shared love of God and vision for the world around us. We are placed in this time and place to be the salt of the earth, that is, to be people on this earth who make a difference in the lives of others who are hurt, heartbroken, or heavy burdened. We come together, forming the body of Christ, so that the world would know what resurrection really means for us all.

The resurrection is not the conclusion of the story. It is the beginning of ours as we live into this prayer.

Most of us will not face anything like what those disciples faced. We will not watch our teacher get arrested. We will not scatter in fear on the night everything falls apart. But we live in the same basic tension they lived in… caught between the world as it is and the world as God intends it, between the love we know in Jesus and the hostility that love often meets in the world.

And on the ordinary days; the tired days, the days when the mission feels too big and we feel too small… this prayer is still being prayed. The Jesus who prayed at that table is the same Jesus who, in the words of Hebrews, “always lives to make intercession” for us. The prayer did not end at that table. It continues.

You are still in the world. And you are still being prayed for. Amen.

Sermon by: Rev. Dave Wasson