In and Within 24 Jesus' Unique Faith

[HKHaugan]

Chapters 13-17 of John’s Gospel contain Jesus’ last teachings.  They take place just before the Passover Feast when Jesus called the disciples together to share ‘The Last Supper.’  When you read these chapters you will see a kind of summary of central Gospel themes, who He is, what He came to do, as well as the role of the disciples and future believers, all of which would be visualized and consummated on the Cross.  They are what I would like to call ‘The Gospel in a Nutshell.’

 

Chapter 17 is the capstone.  It is His final prayer while He is with them.  But this is far more than a teaching. What has been called the Lord’s Prayer was His set of principles to aid our thought processes as to how we approach the Father.  Chapter 17 takes us far deeper.  This is that moment when real trust, real faith, real belief are put to the test.  Teaching is fine but it only goes so far.  Here we see whether or not Jesus is for real.  Everything He taught, the miracles He performed, the mission and ministry of being the Messiah, was He really the God sent Savior the Father’s Word declared?  What questions were going through His mind?  What was He feeling in His heart?  What were the urgings in His Spirit? 

 

Chapter 17 is not about Jesus teaching or demonstrating or modeling with the hidden knowledge that He had the inside track to His Father.  This is about Jesus the man whose only means of eternal survival was that of faith.  Jesus was facing the end believing it was His Father’s will to enter the world limited to live every next moment by faith in His Father, in His Father’s Word and in the Spirit.  He was facing what we all face every day.  The world was stacked against Him, the devil was going to win the day and He alone was going to have to choose to accept death, inevitable death.  He would be betrayed; everyone would desert Him, a religious and political outcast, a pariah.  His decision lay before Him.  The Father’s Word told Him His chosen role would result in death.  Would He be able to bear it all?  We know from Luke 24:42 He prayed to the Father asking to take the cup of suffering away but concluding in faith that The Father’s will not His be done.  He trusted His Father with His heart that the Spirit was going to do His Father’s will.  The point of all this is Jesus thought, decided and acted in faith.  It was Jesus’ faith that is our salvation, our hope and our future.  It is the faith He gives us that we accept as the way.

 

So what we want to grasp is the depth of Jesus’ person as the perfect human person whose life death and resurrection came through faith.  What Scripture does here in John 17 is to see the perfect man of faith praying in faith to the Father of faith in the Spirit of faith.  In Jesus we have a picture of an exposed humanity in prayer in the moments of His most perilous choices where every next moment depended on the perfection of His humanity through faith.  Jesus is the living example of what it means to take up the cross of faith by going to ‘THE’ Cross in faith.  So Jesus’ words means everything here when He says, “As the Father has sent me so I am sending you (Jn.20:21 NIV).”  Next, Jesus praying.