Jesus Prays for Us

God the Son prays to God the Father for me and you today

[This is a sermon for June 1, 2025, the Seventh Sunday of Easter. Churches without pastors, pastors short on time, Bible study leaders, and individuals may feel free to use it.]

John 17:20-26

Today’s gospel lesson is part of what’s often called Jesus’ high priestly prayer. In it, just before His crucifixion and resurrection, God the Son pours His heart out to God the Father.

Our lesson for today contains what may be the most remarkable part of the prayer. Here's why: Jesus prays for us, for you and me.

He prays for those who have received the gifts of repentance and saving faith in Jesus Christ that God gives through the Biblical Word and the Sacraments, Holy Baptism and Holy Communion.

There are three major things Jesus prays for us.

The first thing that Jesus prays is that His Church will be united. Jesus prays: “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

Jesus prays that His Church will reflect the unity that the Father and the Son have. Jesus says that when His Church is united, it proves to the world that Jesus comes from God the Father and that the Father loves His Church with the same love He bears for Jesus.

This petition of Jesus’ prayer has often been misconstrued both inside and outside of Christ’s Church.

Within the Church, it has been used by some as an excuse to enforce institutional uniformity among church members and pastors, often in support of false teaching and evil ends.

For example, the Medieval Church had a system of church indulgences by which believers were told they needed to buy or work their way out of damnation. When Martin Luther challenged this as being unbiblical, pointing out that the Bible teaches that we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ and not by anything we do, he was accused of breaking the unity of the Church.

And nearly five-hundred years later, Lutheran Christians who could not accept what we regarded as overthrowing God’s Word as the ultimate authority over the Church’s life, were accused of breaking the unity of the Church.

But if our unity is rooted in anything other than the God we meet in Jesus and in His Word, the Bible, we don’t have unity nor even the Church, only a collection of people who may or may not like each other.

Unity apart from Jesus and His Word is not what Jesus is praying for here. The Bible tells us, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28) And it says, “So we, though many, are one body in Christ…” (Romans 12:5)

Outside the Church, Jesus prayer for unity is often used as an excuse for not being part of the Church at all.

“All those denominations and all those arguments among Christians in churches,” some people say. “I don’t need it.”

Actually, we do need the Church. The Church is the body of Christ, the family of God, the only entity charged by Jesus with proclaiming the good news of new life through faith in Jesus--the gospel--to the world. No Church: no Christians. No Church; no salvation. No Church; no eternal life. The Church alone carries the saving Word of Jesus Christ into the world.

And nowhere in Scripture are we told that church members don’t or won’t or shouldn't argue. Imagine someone saying of a married couple, “So and so had an argument last week. They must not really be married.” People who care about each other do sometimes argue. And as I've said before, if two people agree on everything, at least one of them is irrelevant...or dead.

“In your anger do not sin,” Ephesians 4:26 tells us. Anger and disagreement are not sins. They only become sins when we use our disagreements to dehumanize others.

Jesus’ prayer continues in verse 24 of our lesson: “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.” The second thing Jesus prays is that you and I will be with Him so that we can see the glory He has had since before the universe came into being.

Back in Old Testament times, when God’s ancient people, the Israelites, were given God’s Law, they refused to come into God’s presence. They were afraid of God’s glory, His rightness, His perfect innocence. The people of God were sure that God’s holiness would break out and destroy them if they came near to Him. Jesus is the bridge Who allows sinners to see and come into the presence of the glory of God. “No one has ever seen God,” John writes early in his gospel, “but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.” (John 1:18) When we see Jesus, in His Word, in the sacraments, in the worship and fellowship of the Church, we see the glory of God. That’s a privilege Christ grants to His Church!

Jesus next prays for us in verses 25 and 26: “Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.” The third thing Jesus asks for us from the Father is that as He continues to reveal Himself and the Father to His people the love of God would fill us.

This love of God isn’t like the counterfeit stuff the world calls love.

A friend of mine caused his parents no end of grief in his teenage years. He got involved in alcohol and drugs. His parents, godly people, tried everything. Nothing changed, except that he got worse. One night, he ODed and was taken to a hospital ER. When he came to, he looked up to see a family friend, a believer in Christ, standing over him. “Joe,” the man said, “your parents have asked me to bring you into my home. I’m going to do that. But you will have to do everything I tell you to do. You will have to do counseling. You will have to work. And you will have to stay clean. Otherwise, neither your parents nor anyone else you know who cares about you can do anything to help you.”

To some those words may seem harsh. But they were words of love, love from God. They were matched by actions, commitment, and sacrifice by the man who took my friend in. Joe got clean, came to faith in Christ, and remains a productive member of society today.

Jesus prays that God’s tough, committed love for us will be seen in us so that others too can believe in Jesus and have eternal life with God!

Earlier, I mentioned two misuses of the first petition of this section of Jesus’ high priestly prayer. But there’s a big misuse to which the whole prayer gets subjected. Well-meaning Christians look at it and think, “I’ve got to work at being united with other believers. I’ve got to work at being in Jesus so that I can see His glory. I’ve to work at being filled with Jesus’ love.”

If you come away from worship today thinking that Jesus’ words are a work plan or a set of homework assignments for Christians wanting to be better people, it will only prove that you haven’t been paying attention.

Our lesson doesn’t present a plan for personal improvement. Our lesson lets us listen in on Jesus’ pray for us.

Jesus is praying that He will be seen in those who seek to follow Him.

Our call is to daily turn to Him in humility at the baptismal font, at the Communion table, and in His Word. As we turn to Jesus, it’s Jesus Who goes to work, not us.

He covers us in His grace and gives us saving faith in Him.

He forgives our sins, gives us awe at His glory, and fills us with His love and with Himself.

God the Father has been answering this prayer from Jesus for believers for more than two-thousand years now. He’s answering it even now in you.

Today, He has charged me to tell you once again that in Jesus Christ, all your sins are totally forgiven. He died and rose to make this a reality for you. Then He gave you the Church so that, in a fallen world, the daily circumstances of which can cause us to contract spiritual amnesia, we can gather with God’s people as we’re doing again this morning and once more, through the Word–preached, taught, sung, and proclaimed–and through the Sacraments, receive again all of God’s good news, all of Christ’s gospel. In Christ, your Lord, you are made righteous, innocent, clean of all sin and you have life with God that is yours forever.

You can trust in that.

You can trust in Jesus.

Now, go in peace and serve the Lord.

Amen