John 17:1,2

“ These things spoke Jesus; then he lifted up his eyes to heaven and said: Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee; 2, as thou hast given him power over all flesh, that to all those whom thou hast given him he should give eternal life. ”

If Jesus had uttered the preceding words on the way from Jerusalem to Gethsemane, He must now have been on the point of crossing the brook Cedron. At this decisive moment, He collects Himself and prays. The words: He spoke these things, clearly distinguish the preceding discourses from the solemn act of prayer. This also is indicated by the lifting the eyes towards heaven. Until this point, Jesus had looked upon the disciples while speaking to them. To raise the eyes towards heaven is a natural effort of the soul to the end of escaping from the earthly prison, an aspiration after beholding the living God, whose glory is, above all, resplendent in the pure serenity of the heavens. No doubt this act can have taken place in a room (Acts 7:55); but it is much more easily intelligible in the open air; comp. John 11:41; Mark 7:34. The words: And he said, mark the moment when, beyond the visible heaven, His heart met the face of God, and when in the God of the universe He beholds His Father. The Alexandrian reading: “ having lifted up his eyes, he said,” is more flowing and more in the Greek style; the received reading: “ he lifted up his eyes and said,” is more simple and Hebraistic; could this be a proof in favor of the first?

The name Father expresses the spirit of the whole prayer which is to follow. Jesus certainly employed the Aramaic term Abba; comp. Mark 14:36. This term, in which He was accustomed to concentrate the holiest emotions of His filial heart, became sacred to the Christians, and passed as such into the language of the New Testament, as the expression of the sentiment of divine adoption and filial adoration (Romans 8:15, Galatians 4:6). The hour is that of which John and Jesus Himself had said many times, in the course of this Gospel, that it was not yet come: it is that of His exaltation through death. But in order that it may result in the glorification of the Son, the intervention of the Father will be necessary; this is what Jesus asks for by the word: Glorify! Some explain this glorification of Jesus by the moral perfection which, with the divine aid. He will cause to shine forth in His sufferings, and by the attractive power which He will thus exercise over the hearts of men. These explanations are, as Reuss acknowledges, incompatible with John 17:5, where we see beyond question that Jesus is thinking of His personal reinstatement in the divine state which He had had before His incarnation. Only it is not necessary to restrict this glory which Jesus asks again as the orthodox interpreters in general suppose to the enjoyment of divine blessedness and glory. For the aim of this request of Jesus is not His own satisfaction, but the continuation and finishing of His work, as is shown by the following words: that thy Son may glorify thee. What He desires is new means of action. He asks consequently for the restoration to His complete divine state, the possession of the divine omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence of which He had divested Himself in order to appropriate to Himself a true human state. He cannot continue to glorify God and to develop the work of salvation, the foundation of which is now laid, except on this condition.

His personal state must be transformed quite as much as it was transformed when Jesus passed from the divine state to the human existence. He speaks of Himself in the third person: thy Son. This is what we always do when we wish to draw the attention of the one to whom we address ourselves to what we are for him. There is nothing suspicious, therefore, in this manner of speaking which John attributes to Jesus. It is, moreover, in conformity with the ordinary manner in which He speaks of Himself in the Synoptics, where He habitually designates Himself by the title: the Son of man. What would be more justly open to suspicion, would be the form presented by the Alexandrian reading, which is adopted by Tischendorf and defended by Weiss and Westcott: “that the Son may glorify thee. ” Instead of expressing the filial feeling of Jesus, as the received text “ thy Son” does, this reading has a purely dogmatic tinge, precisely as in the analogous passages John 1:18 and John 16:28. The particle καί after ἵνα, “that also,” is omitted by the Alexandrian authorities and is rejected by Tischendorf, etc. But this little word may easily have been omitted. It brings out well the relation between the glorification of the Father by the Son and that of the Son by the Father, and consequently the filial spirit which animates this petition: Jesus wishes to be glorified by His Father only that He may be able in His turn to glorify Him.