When setting out to complete a mission, whether an individual person, a business, or a government, we like to see that everything goes right. Nobody likes a failed mission. There are some who look over Jesus’ life, reading through the Gospels, and when they come to His arrest and subsequent crucifixion, they look at it as a horrible, unfortunate event, a mistake, a failed mission. They may acknowledge that God rectified it by raising Jesus, but they still feel that it was a failed mission. Let’s look at what the Scripture says about this. Did Jesus complete what He was sent to do? Was God pleased with Jesus? As we look in our Bible passage for today, from the Gospel of John, we will see that Jesus did not fail in the mission the Lord gave Him.
The 17th chapter of John’s Gospel is a prayer that the Lord Jesus prayed to God. It is the High Priestly prayer He made. Jesus is talking to the Father, and we get to listen to His prayer. We are just looking at a brief segment at the start of the chapter, and in this portion we read His prayer for God to bring Him glory, and how He prayed for His disciples.
As our Scripture opens, Jesus prayed to the Father, and spoke of how “the hour has come” (vs. 1). What was the “hour”? This refers to the hour or time of Jesus’ death, His upcoming crucifixion, along with the Resurrection and glorification which would follow. Within just a few hours, Jesus would be arrested, given a phony trial, brutally scourged and beaten, and then crucified. This was not something that came upon Him unexpectedly. This was not a surprise, a big “oops, that wasn’t supposed to happen” moment. Jesus had spoken of His crucifixion to His disciples several times. (Luke 9:22-27; Mark 9:30-32; Matthew 20:17-19; and Matthew 26:1-2).
As Jesus spoke of this hour having arrived, He spoke of it bringing glory, glory both to the Son, Himself, and also glory to God the Father. How did Jesus glorify God? He did so by carrying out the will of God in all things. If this was something that was not supposed to happen, it would not bring glory to God. Jesus prayed that He would be glorified by finishing His mission of redemption, and by bringing people salvation, by bringing them to the Father. The mission that Jesus had been given was not just to teach people how to live better lives, but was primarily, and most importantly, to redeem mankind, to bring salvation to all who come to Him, which could only be accomplished by His death on the cross. That was His mission, that was the work He was to do, and in His prayer to the Father, He reported that He was finishing the work He had been given (vs. 4).
Jesus was not only fully God, but He was also fully man, and as a man, knowing that He would soon be going through brutal torture, and the awful death of crucifixion, that must not have been a pleasant thought. No one relishes the thought of terrible, dreadful pain. As we see in His prayer, though, Jesus looked past the cross and its horror, to when He would return to the glory that He shared with God the Father before the world began (vs. 5), and the multitudes of souls that would be saved.
As Jesus continued with His prayer in this Scripture passage by praying for His disciples (vs. 6-11). He acknowledged that they were the ones God gave to Him, and thought they were not perfect, they kept God’s Word, and were true to the Light, the Truth He had taught them. Jesus prayed that His disciples would be protected, unified, sanctified, and sustained against Satan and the world.
This world is a battleground. It is a place where the forces of Satan and those of God are at war. Satan is motivated by bitter hatred of Jesus. So in His prayers for His disciples, and we see later in the chapter for us as well (John 17:20), Jesus prays for God to keep all believers safe from Satan’s power. That is His desire, as God is glorified when souls are saved, not in material things.
Jesus’ prayers hamstring Satan. He is praying for us, and God will hear the intercessory prayers of His Son, as the Son and the Father are One (vs. 10). As we can see through this priestly prayer of the Lord Jesus, this was not a failed mission, but one that can be triumphantly declared as a “Mission Accomplished”!
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