The Gospel of St. John: A Series of Discourses. / New Edition

by Frederick Denison Maurice

THE PRAYER OF THE HIGH PRIEST.

[Lincoln's Inn, 10th Sunday after Trinity (Afternoon), July 27, 1856.]

St. John XVII. 1.

These words spake Jesus, and lifted up His eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee.

The more we enter into our Lord's teaching, the more profound is our apprehension of the dignity, the awfulness, the divinity of words; the more we confess their insufficiency. If He who was in the beginning with God is the Word, if words have been the expression of His mind, they awaken those thoughts in our minds which they are intended to clothe. But if the Word has spoken of Himself as a Son; if He has said that He has come from a Father; if He has promised a Comforter, He has taken us out of the region of words into the heart of the realities which they represent. It is the Son Himself who reveals the Father: what could words effect without His Person? The Father Himself, He has said, draws us to the Son: words would be spoken in vain if there were not that wonderful and loving attraction upon the hearts of the creatures whom He has formed in the image of the Son. The Spirit's work is to produce that inward conviction which words cannot produce, to act upon the man himself, to bind those into fellowship whom the diversities of speech and custom have made unintelligible to each other, to testify to men of the Father and the Son, as the ground of all speech, thought, and being. But here, as throughout this Gospel, the deepest revelation is the commonest and simplest. As we enter into the region of the divine relations, of divine communion, all must tremble; none are forbidden to approach. Intellectual differences disappear; here every spirit may find its home.

We sometimes ask ourselves, as we read the prayer in this chapter—and it is good that we should ask ourselves—'Is this the model of our prayer? Is Christ giving us an example here that we should follow in His steps? Or does it stand awfully alone, separated from every other that ever has been or can be offered; one which we are to wonder at the more, because so vast a chasm separates it from all our acts and efforts of devotion?' I believe that if we have not understood the acts and discourses on the Paschal night, there can be but one answer to this question. 'The Son of God praying to His Father the night before His Passion,—how entirely isolated,' we should say, 'must such intercourse be from all that ever has been, from all that can be conceived of! What blasphemy to connect it, even in thought, with the petitions of those who have little to do but to confess their sins, and supplicate forgiveness!' But if we have studied these chapters; if we have learnt that when the disciples saw Christ they saw the Father; if we have understood that He is the Vine, and they the branches; if we have known what He meant when He told them that they were to ask in His name, that their joy might be full; if we have observed how He distinguishes the disciples from the world, and yet how He teaches them that everything they do is to be done for the world, and as a witness of God's love to the world; then, I think, we shall feel that it is the greatest of all contradictions to suppose that this prayer does not contain in itself the essence and meaning of all prayer, that it is not the one which best expresses the wants and longings of every man, that it is not the prayer of all the children of God, in all places and in all ages, because it is the prayer of the only-begotten Son of God.

'These words spake Jesus, and lifted up His eyes to heaven, and said, Father, the hour is come.' He had spoken to His disciples of an hour of travail, which was to terminate in a new birth for them and for the world. The world knew nothing of this hour; no one of its works or pleasures was interrupted; that night was like every other night. The disciples had a dull sense of present oppression, a vague presentiment of approaching calamity. But they, as little as the world, felt what the sorrow was, still less what joy they had to expect when it was over. He knew it all. He knew inwardly that that was the hour to fulfil the purpose for which He was come into the world. The life and death of the world were gathered up into it. The feeling would have been intolerable if it had been a solitary, separate one; but the foresight of it had been given Him by His Father; the sense that the hour was come was imparted by Him; His prayer was the acknowledgment of that which had been revealed to Him, His filial acceptance of that which had been prepared for Him. And surely, brethren, all prayer must be this. It is the acknowledging of that, be it sad or joyful, which has been given to us; it is the casting our experience upon Him who has brought us into it, and who understands it, because without Him we cannot go through it, or in the least understand it ourselves.

And this is the petition which is grounded upon that confession, 'Glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee.' Every prayer that had been presented since the creation-day had been a prophecy of this. When the Psalmist cried out of the depths, 'Lord, hear my voice;' when he said, 'Let not any be offended or confounded because of me;' when he confessed his sin, that God might be justified, and might be clear when He was judged, he seemed to say, 'Glorify me, that I may glorify thee;' he seemed to pray, 'Let me, David, be brought out of my ignorance and darkness and sin, that thy name may be honoured and not blasphemed.' He did really pray, 'Glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee!' He prayed that not he, but that the Son of Man, might be raised and delivered and exalted, in order that God's own image might be exalted, and might shine forth upon men. When the Son of Man actually in His own person prayed this prayer, He was expressing that which was latent and could not be expressed in those earlier petitions; He was bringing them forth into their full clearness and power; He was actually presenting them in His own name to Him who had known and inspired the suppliant.

'As thou hast given Him power over all flesh, that He should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given Him.' I do not think that when we are occupied with the words of our Lord Himself, spoken in prayer the night before His crucifixion, we have a right to alter them in the slightest degree, for the sake of extracting from them what may seem to us a more natural and obvious signification. I am quite aware that our translators would have appeared to themselves and to many of their readers to be using an uncouth and strange form of speech if they had rendered the words literally, 'That all that which thou hast given to Him, He may give to them life eternal.' But I think they were bound to encounter any apparent difficulty of construction, rather than to incur the risk of contracting or perverting this sense. It was not a time to ask themselves whether their understandings could fully measure or take in the words. If they had faith in Him who spoke them, they should have given them exactly, and left Him to interpret them in His own time to those who had need of them. Christ says that His Father has given Him power over all flesh. He speaks, again, of all (everything) which His Father had given to Him. And then, leaving the neuter, πᾶν, He uses the masculine plural, them, αὔτοις, surely that He may denote the universality of the gift, as well as the personality of those on whom it is bestowed. It seems to me that we cannot afford to lose either of the truths which He thus declares, because it requires a violation of the technicalities of grammar, not of its essential laws, to utter them both. I suppose it was only in prayer that even He could have united them; and possibly it is only in prayer that we can apprehend them, so that they should not clash with each other.

'And this is the eternal life, that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.' If these words came upon us for the first time, without any preparation, we should perhaps think them very wonderful, but should either pass them over, or try to reduce them under some notions or formulas of ours. But in this Gospel we have been most carefully educated into an apprehension of their force; they do not burst upon us suddenly, though they may be both more full and more distinct than any with which we can compare them. In the night dialogue with Nicodemus, by the well with the woman of Samaria, in the synagogue at Capernaum after the feast of the five loaves, in Jerusalem on the great day of the Feast of Tabernacles, we have been hearing of a life which the Son of Man gives, a life of the Spirit, a life which is not of yesterday or to-day, a life of communion, a life of God. If what was said there was true, this must be true; or rather, this is the truth which throws back a light upon the words concerning the new life, and the 'water of life,' and the 'bread of life.' This explains the assurance in man that he is born to know that which is above himself, and his equally strong assurance that he must be known before he can know. The only true God knows the creature in all his wanderings and ignorance and falsehood, knows him in that Son in whom He has created him. When he turns to that God of truth, when he confesses Him and the Son, who is His image and the Light of man, then comes the true life, the eternal life, which Christ, who has power over all flesh, alone confers upon it.