What Jesus Prays For--May 19, 2026

What Jesus Prays For--May 19, 2026

[Jesus prayed:] "All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I have been glorified in them. And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.” (John 17:10-11)

Being allowed into someone else's prayer life is a profoundly personal experience.  Even more than reading someone's favorite book, listening to their current playlist, or even sneaking a peek at their diary, when you know what someone else is praying about, you get a pretty clear glimpse of their soul. We reveal our deepest hopes, name our greatest needs, confess our most potent fears, and offer up our strongest loves in prayer. 

It's true of you and me, and it's true of Jesus, too.  That is to say, we learn something remarkable about Jesus by overhearing what he prays for, as we are getting the chance to do with these words from John 17 which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship.  Here in what is often called Jesus' "high priestly prayer" Jesus brings to the One he calls "Father" and "Abba" his deep concern for... us, of all people.  Jesus prays in this moment, maybe mere minutes from heading to the garden in which he will meet the lynch-mob and religious police who will arrest him and then send him to the Romans for torture and execution, and yet John our narrator here wants us to see that Jesus isn't concerned about his own comfort or safety, but rather the ongoing community of his followers... who have also become his friends.  And by the end of the whole prayer, Jesus has even included "those who will come to believe" in his concern, which means that you and I were on Jesus' mind as he stared down the shadow of the cross.

Just that reality by itself is amazing to me.  In a time when so many other Big Deals and So-and-Sos seem to care only about their own interests, saving their own skin, or managing their own fortunes, Jesus is more concerned about the likes of us. Rather than angling for a way to protect himself, duck responsibility, or burnish his own reputation, Jesus seeks our well-being before his own. That kind of love is mind-boggling.

But once we get a bit deeper, there is even more to surprise us about Jesus' prayer life. And that's because what Jesus prays for on our behalf might not align with our personal wish-lists or expectations.  You don't hear Jesus praying for "health, wealth, and prosperity" for his followers. You don't hear any talk of helping us get more power or prestige, and there's not a whiff of asking for divine assistance in "taking back their country for God" or working the levers of political power.  Jesus isn't launching an empire or seeking financial success for his disciples.  And given how many of Jesus' followers ended up giving up their lives as his witnesses, it seems that Jesus doesn't even prioritize our physical comfort and security in his prayer life, either.  Instead, Jesus prays that we, his followers would be "one" in the same manner of unity that Jesus himself and the Father are One.

Now, that's saying something.  For church nerds who know about the backstory of the ancient Creeds, that's a gobsmacking claim.  Classically, Christians have professed that Jesus, who is God the Son, is "of one Being with the Father," and in fact is "God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God."  To be as "one" as the Father and the Son is the kind of unity you have with your own thoughts and actions, or the overlap between you and your words, or you and your own image in the mirror.  Christians confess, following the lead of John the Gospel Writer, that Jesus is the very Word of God, which is to say that Jesus is God's chosen and clearest self-expression.  So the same way that the Father is one with the Son, that's what Jesus now prays for us his followers to be.  He prays for our unity, our being bound together in love, and for our fully and mutually shared life in community.

Wow.  That's what's on Jesus' heart on his last night with his disciples.  He prays for us to be held together in love, the same way God's own Being is comprised of the love between Father, Son, and Spirit. How different that is from the way we are sometimes tempted to think of ourselves--as isolated individuals, or even like customers of church who come and go as we please and take our business elsewhere if we find a product we like just a smidge better.  It is easy in our day and age to think of ourselves as individual audience members when we come to worship, and to imagine that we have no need to interact with the other people around us. After all, if we are just like moviegoers in a theater, I expect everyone else to keep to themselves so I can enjoy the latest Marvel movie or romantic comedy.  Sometimes we let ourselves believe that's what we are in church--just individual ticket-holders who share nothing in common, necessarily, with the people next to us.  But Jesus' prayer life says differently.  He prays for us to be more than random strangers who happen to gather in the same building on Sunday morning.  He prays for us to be held together even more closely than a family, held by the relentless love of God that embraces us even when we are at our worst. We cannot avoid sharing life with one another--our joys, our sorrows, our struggles, and our successes, because we are being prayed into the same kind of loving unity that holds God's own triune life together.  For us there is never the option of saying to another, "I don't have to care about you."  We belong to one another as fully and completely as God the Son and God the Father belong to each other.  

Sounds like we are in this for the long haul.

Today, how might it change our approach to interacting with each other to take Jesus' prayer life seriously, and to see our connection with each other as something Jesus thought was so important that he prayed about it more than saving his own life on the way to the cross?  How might we be changed by realizing what Jesus prays for?

Lord Jesus, let us be shaped by your own prayer, and bind us together in love with one another.