The Heart of Jesus

Whenever we step into the Gospel of John, we are stepping onto holy ground. But today, as we open our hearts to the word of God, we find ourselves in a particularly sacred space. We are gathered in the Upper Room, lingering in the quiet, heavy moments just before the world changes forever. The meal has been eaten. Feet have been washed. Words of comfort and challenge have been shared in the farewell discourse. And then, Jesus does something profoundly intimate: he prays.

This passage is often referred to by scholars and theologians as the High Priestly Prayer. But to simply label it as such can sometimes make it feel distant, institutional, or overly formal. It might be tempting to look at this text as a manual for how we are supposed to pray, a liturgical template passed down from the master. Yet, if we try to read it as a strict how-to guide for prayer, we might miss the deeper beauty of what is actually happening.

This prayer is not a demonstration. It is a window. It is an invitation to peer directly into the heart of Jesus. In these verses, Jesus lays bare his deepest desires for his friends, for the world, and for all of us who would eventually follow in their footsteps. It is a warm, expansive moment of vulnerability. And as we look through this window, we begin to notice that the landscape outside looks quite different than we might expect. We realize that Jesus is inviting us to see reality, time, and eternal life through an entirely new lens.

A Different Dimension of Time

To understand this prayer, we have to understand how time works in the Gospel of John, because it operates quite differently than it does in the rest of our sacred texts. In the synoptic gospels Matthew, Mark, and Luke there is a sense of chronological progression. In those stories, the true identity of Jesus, his divine glory, is often masked. It is kept hidden, a secret to be revealed only at the very end of the journey.

But John flips this script. In John’s gospel, the glory of Jesus isn’t a surprise ending waiting behind a curtain. It is available at any point, right here and right now, through faith. Time is not a straight line marching toward a distant revelation; rather, eternity is constantly breaking into the present moment.
The theologian Andrew McGowan captures this beautifully. He notes that even early in the narrative, Jesus suggests a completely different way of thinking not just about his own story, but about ours. McGowan points to John 5:24, where Jesus says, “Anyone who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life, and does not come under judgment, but has passed from death to life.”

Notice the tense there. It is not that you will pass from death to life someday in the distant future. You have passed. Faith in Jesus, then, amounts to a kind of transport to a different realm. In the meantime, it calls us to a different sort of allegiance, an allegiance to the ways of peace, justice, and love, rather than the ways of empire and exclusion.
When we read this prayer in John 17, Jesus is physically sitting at a table with his disciples. We can understand this chronologically. But the way John has constructed the narrative, it feels as though Jesus has quietly slipped out of the upper room, slipped outside the constraints of time itself, to have a conversation with God that takes place in eternity. He speaks of things that have happened, are happening, and will happen, all simultaneously. It is a theological time warp. From a narrative perspective, it is the earthly Jesus speaking. From a theological perspective, this is a post-resurrection message from the cosmic Christ, speaking to his disciples and to us across the span of all time.

Living in the In-Between

What does this mean for us, sitting here in our pews, living our everyday lives? It means we find ourselves living in both pre-resurrection and post-resurrection time.
Think about the rhythms of your own spiritual life. There are times when the daily, earthly ministry of Jesus speaks powerfully and directly to our immediate circumstances. We need the Jesus who feeds the hungry, who challenges the corrupt systems, who sits with the marginalized, and who walks dusty roads. We rely on that pre-resurrection Jesus to guide our ethics, our politics, and our community care.

But there are other times—perhaps when we are grieving, when we are exhausted by the news cycle, or when the weight of the world feels too heavy to bear—when we desperately rely on the post-resurrection promise. We need the assurance that there is more to all of this. We need the promise that we can rest and reside with God, right now.
Sometimes, finding that post-resurrection peace requires intentionality. For some of us, that might look like stepping away from the noise of the city and finding a quiet trail to hike, where the ancient rocks and whispering pines remind us of a time much older and slower than our own. In those moments, we step out of chronological time and brush up against theological time. We are able to know the divine presence simply because we trust the one who promised it. Because Jesus is present with the disciples, they will also be with him in glory. And that warm, open promise is just as true for you and me today.

Rethinking Eternal Life

This brings us to a concept that plays a massive role in John’s gospel, but one that is so often misunderstood in our modern, western context: eternal life.
If we are honest, our contemporary ideas about eternal life often don’t match John’s understanding of the term. For centuries, the church has frequently taught eternal life as a destination a golden city in the clouds, a place we go to after we die if we have believed the right doctrines or prayed the right prayers. And certainly, there is imagery in scripture that points toward a great, heavenly hope.

But when we become too focused on some abstract place we might go after death, we lose sight of what is right in front of us. We miss out on another, far more urgent message. In the Gospel of John, Jesus isn’t inviting us to a place. He is inviting us into a way of being. He is inviting us into a new identity, one that is firmly rooted and grounded in the unconditional love of God.

The scholar Mary Coloe writes beautifully about this. She says, “As Son, he reveals God’s love for the world and God’s desire to draw all into God’s own eternity life, which is to participate in the very being of God.”

To have eternal life is to participate in the being of God today. It is a present-tense reality. Chelsey Harmon adds another vital layer to this progressive understanding. She writes, “The most striking thing to me in this passage is that Jesus centers knowing God as what is essential for eternal life not salvation and redemption through the forgiveness of sins as we have traditionally come to understand it. It’s a sign that Jesus Christ’s work of atonement stretches beyond the instance of the cross and involves all of his birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension.”

This is a profoundly liberating theological shift. Eternal life is not a transactional ticket punched at the cross to get us out of a fiery afterlife. Eternal life is intimate relationship. It is knowing God, and being known by God, right here, right now, on Earth. Jesus’ entire existence his incarnation, his teachings, his solidarity with human suffering, his death, and his victorious life all of it is the atonement. All of it is the mechanism by bringing us back into atonement with the Divine.

A Glory Rooted in Love

Through this deep knowing, through this participation in the being of God, we are given a new understanding of glory. In our world, glory is a loaded word. The love of the world ascribes glory to wealth, to military might, to political dominance, and to those who hold power over others. It is a glory built on exclusion and hierarchy.
But Jesus completely subverts this. The glory of Jesus does not belong to a hoarding God, nor does it belong to a power-hungry messiah. The glory of Jesus belongs to those who love him. It is a glory demonstrated by the one who returns to God and abides there still, holding the door open for the rest of us.

Through Jesus, we are called to act in love. As followers of this way, we are asked to bear witness to another world. We are asked to show our communities that true glory is found in mutual care, in the dismantling of oppressive systems, in radical inclusion, and in the quiet, everyday acts of compassion that go unnoticed by the empires of this world. We witness to a realm where the greatest among us is the one who serves, and where glory is synonymous with self-giving love.

The Spirit Praying Through Us

As we sit with this passage, as we look through this window into the heart of Jesus, I want to leave you with a final question to ponder for your own spiritual journey.

We often read this text and find immense comfort in the idea that Jesus is praying for us. And he is. But what if we took it a step further? What if we understood this prayer not just as a historical event of Jesus praying for his disciples, but as the active, living Holy Spirit praying through us today?

Does that change the way you think about this passage? If the Holy Spirit is praying this prayer through your own heart, then you are not just a passive recipient of God’s grace. You are an active participant in God’s eternal life. You are the vessel through which God is calling the world toward unity, toward peace, and toward a love that defies all boundaries.
May we be a people who live in this sacred, in-between time with grace. May we embrace eternal life not as a distant destination, but as a present reality of knowing and loving the Divine in our neighbours. And may we allow the Spirit to pray through us, echoing the heart of Jesus into a world that so desperately needs his love.

Amen.