LWML Sunday-St. John 3:16 & St. John 17:1-3, 6-8, 20-26

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son,+ and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

‘ “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.”’ (St. Jn. 3:16)

It is this love of God given to you and I through the Son, Jesus, that we see poured out in the only prayer of Jesus that is recorded for our knowledge. This is a prayer like the Lord’s Prayer (St. Mt. 6:9-15), which gives us a form in which to pray.

Like the Lord’s Prayer, we see in our reading from chapter seventeen what it is we are to pray for. We also see Jesus praying the Lord’s Prayer in a more drawn out fashion. He here expands on each of the petitions for us.

An illustration for both of these passages of Christ’s words comes to us as follows. One rainy Sunday afternoon, a father was babysitting his children and had the task of keeping them entertained. He assigned a specific task to each child.

To keep his ten-year old son occupied; the father had torn a full-page map from out of a magazine, cut it into small pieces, and told his son to reassemble it. To his father’s amazement, this son presented him with the completed puzzle in just a few minutes. I would expect he had intended this to occupy the entire afternoon and was shocked when, with so many small pieces, the son returned so quickly. After all, many adults cannot complete even a familiar picture when it is cut up as a jigsaw puzzle usually is.

“How did you do it?” he asked. “It was easy,” the boy replied. “At first, when I tried to fit together all those little lines and dots and the small print on the map, it looked like an impossible job. Then I saw part of a man’s face on the back of one of the pieces. So I turned the pieces over, and when I got the man together, the United States took care of itself.” Depending on the magazine, that man may have been Jesus. Unfortunately for us, the majority of magazines do not seem to include anything about our Christian faith on their pages, much less the image of mankind’s Savior.

This small story illustrates for us that the jigsaw puzzle of this life makes sense and we get it all together when we live our life against the background of Christ. This is to say, faith in Christ as Redeemer and Lord makes all the pieces fit.[1]

As Jesus describes in the verses of chapter seventeen His prayer and plans for His Apostles and other later disciples and believers, we see the love described in St. John 3:16 as it plays out in our own lives. Jesus is again illustrating His own earlier words for us with this High Priestly Prayer.

In all of our lives Jesus wishes for us as His followers that we would behave in this life with mercy. Those of us who have the jigsaw of life put together through our focus on our Savior this becomes easy. We are given power through the Holy Spirit to live a life of love to those around us. This includes both our family and friends, but also our enemies. As we have been shown mercy by our Father through Jesus, so also do we show mercy to our neighbors. Those whom we meet in our daily life.

‘After Jesus had said this, He looked toward heaven and prayed: “Father, the time has come. Glorify Your Son, that Your Son may glorify You. For You granted Him authority over all people that He might give eternal life to all those You have given Him. Now this is eternal life: that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent.”’ (St. Jn. 17:1-3)

Those first statements of Jesus made in this prayer, that the Father would glorify Him, is the only petition referring to Jesus. The rest of this long prayer is for you and for me and for the Apostles as they, and we, spread the word to a lost world. Jesus is not simply asking for strength to face His passion and the death of the cross, but that He would glorify the Father in all of those actions. Also and especially that in the resurrection and ascension that “Your Son may glorify You.”

The third verse in this chapter, this is a restatement of what Jesus had said to Nicodemus in 3:16: ‘"Now this is eternal life: that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent.”’ (V. 3) The continuing nature of this statement of Jesus, ‘that they may know You’, is better expressed by the Greek text. For there it tells us that Jesus is trying to say something like this: “should keep on knowing”.

As Jesus says here, knowledge of the only true God is through Jesus Christ (see also, 14:6-9).

‘“I have revealed You to those whom You gave Me out of the world. They were Yours; You gave them to Me and they have obeyed Your word. Now they know that everything You have given Me comes from You. For I gave them the words You gave Me and they accepted them. They knew with certainty that I came from You, and they believed that You sent Me.”’ (Vv. 6-8)

The word Jesus uses here, translated as “revealed”, is another way of saying that He has accomplished everything. Jesus is speaking of in the future tense here the same thing He will say from the cross later, “It is finished!” As the disciples listen in, Jesus is praying here of His glorification, His crucifixion, as if it has already been completed.

It is interesting to note how Jesus refers to His Apostles here. The same terminology applies to you and me as well. Jesus refers to these men as the Father’s gift to Him. These fishermen and a tax-gatherer and others were not won over by clever arguments. Jesus did not talk them into the faith. Instead, Jesus tells us here that we all as Christians are the Father’s gift to Him. Most especially as shown in this prayer it is the eleven. As you will note if you read it again this evening, and I recommend you do, Judas is not present for this High Priestly Prayer of Jesus, he left earlier in the evening (13:2-3; 18:3-11).

Jesus then goes on to tell us that His disciples now know everything that the Father had given Him to tell them. They knew everything and yet, as we see from the last chapter of St. Luke, these men did not yet understand all that Jesus had taught them. Though, they did understand more than they are sometimes given credit for. At this point though, there were certain things, as John notes periodically in this Gospel, which these eleven men did not understand until after the resurrection. Yet, they still knew these things by this point, on the night that Jesus was to be betrayed.

These men, after all, had been given the words the Father gave to Jesus to give to the Apostles. With the passing of the Transfiguration, as well as other proofs, these men knew with certainty that Jesus had come from the Almighty God. It is interesting to note that this fact is a great comfort to Jesus. We see this in the words of His prayer. We often do not remember to give human feelings to Jesus as we would to another man. We too often view Jesus as somehow more than human. Yet, we are reminded by such passages of Scripture as this, Jesus was no more and no less human than you or me.

We are reminded again in this prayer that as Peter, James, John and all the others were Apostles to all of us and to our ancestors, so also, Christ is God’s Apostle to man (Heb. 3:1). That is, Christ Jesus is God’s “sent one” to man.

This is the final teaching for these men who would be given “beautiful feet” (Is. 52:7) for their mission of spreading the Gospel of God’s mercy in Christ to all men after the resurrection. This is the initial fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy that we heard this morning.

After all, as we commonly pray in the words of the Kyrie: “Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.” (St. Mk. 10:47) What the Father by inspiration of the Holy Spirit tells us through Isaiah, and John, in answer to this prayer of ours is a resounding, glorious beautiful, “YES! Yes, dear child, I will be merciful and forgive your sins for the sake of Jesus.”

This mercy is what we live for. This forgiveness and mercy is what each of us received in our baptisms. This forgiveness and mercy is what we receive again in the Absolution each week. This forgiveness and mercy is what we eat (see Ps. 119:103; Ezek. 3:3-4) and drink each time we partake of the Lord’s Supper. It is in this that our souls, if not our physical mouths, shout for joy with the watchmen of Isaiah’s prophecy. For it is in these places that we are finally and resoundingly told “Yes, my dear child, I will be merciful and will forgive all of your sins for Jesus’ sake,” by our Righteous Father.

And so, as with Simeon when he held the infant Jesus (St. Lk. 2:25-35), we can now joyously depart in peace. We have seen our salvation!

In Jesus’+ Name. Amen.

[1] Encyclopedia of Sermon Illustrations, p. 75 entry #321.