After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed: “Father, the hour 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 know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do.And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began. I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one. While I was with them, I protected them and kept them safe bythat name you gave me. None has been lost except the one doomed to destruction so that Scripture would be fulfilled. I am coming to you now, but I say these things while I am still in the world, so that they may have the full measure of my joy within them. I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world. My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it.

–John 17.1-5, 11-16 (NIV)

Today is Maundy Thursday. Maundy comes from the Latin antiphon, Novum Mandatum, meaning “a new mandate.” It originates in Jesus’ mandate to his disciples in John 13.34 to love one another. Maundy Thursday begins a three day period starting tonight known as the Easter or Paschal Triduum and today’s passage comes from Jesus’ prayer during the Last Supper.

Here we see our Lord asking God to glorify him through his impending crucifixion and we remember the terrible cost of our rebellion against God. We remember the Father’s great love for us in taking on our flesh and suffering himself the full weight of his wrath poured out on our rebelliousness. This should make any of us who have an understanding of the human condition pause and lament over that which we have heaped on our Lord. It is not pretty and tomorrow we will have a terrible visualization of the true cost of God’s love for us.

In his prayer, Jesus goes on to tell us what eternal life is–knowing God manifested through himself. We are reminded that it was God alone who made it possible for us to be reconciled to him through Jesus’ death on the cross, and in saying this we must always remember that Jesus was God himself made man. What does this mean for us? It means that when we turn in faith to Jesus, our whole orientation is different. To know God and his Son Jesus means that we stop trying to make ourselves God and resolve to let God be God.

Moreover, to know God means that we know Jesus and follow his example of humility, service, and suffering love, which perforce goes against our natural inclination toward selfishness, self-aggrandizement, pride, and the rest of the ugliness that besets human beings and defaces God’s image in us. We can know God precisely because we have seen him as a human in Jesus. We listen to Jesus’ commandment to love and we watch our Lord in action. We watch him heal the sick, give sight to the blind, offer mercy to sinners, and raise the dead. In doing so we are astonished to realize that we are watching God put his Kingdom into effect here on earth as it is in heaven and we resolve with the help of the Spirit to put to death that which is in us that keeps us hostile toward God. When we know God in Jesus we take seriously Jesus’ command to us to deny ourselves, take up our cross each day, and follow him.

In doing so, Jesus reminds us that we are going to face severe opposition from the world and from the powers and principalities who hate him (and us), and who would seek to destroy us. But has our Lord reminds us, we are not to fear or lose heart because when we embody Jesus and take him to his broken and hurting world, we have his protection. This doesn’t mean we are immune to danger, hurt, sorrow, or betrayal, to name just a few. Jesus himself was not immune to these things during his earthly life. Rather, we have Jesus’ promise never to let us go so that not even death itself can separate us from him. We have his promise to be with us each day through the presence of the Holy Spirit.

And it all begins on Calvary. Not only do we find eternal life in Jesus’ death, we find our marching orders here in this world. As our Lord commands us in his prayer, we are not to withdraw from the world; we are to imitate our Lord and allow him to use us to help him bring forth his Kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven. Here we find the whole package for life and living. Our future is secured for us by God’s great love for us in Christ. We find comfort and hope in that knowledge and we find meaning and purpose in this present life by imitating our Lord in his patience, humility, service, and suffering love for others. It’s not what we expected from God. Yet if we have the needed faith and humility to hear God speak to us through Jesus, we will discover that following a crucified Messiah is so much better than what we could possibly imagine about God because we realize that, like Jesus, God will bless our suffering and turn it into his glory and ours.

Think deeply on these things as you follow your Lord tonight to dark Gethsemane and tomorrow to Calvary. Think deeply about the terrible and costly love manifested for you. But don’t stop with simply having a contrite and broken spirit over what God has suffered for you. Remember too with a glad and thankful heart that you have been freed from your sins to serve in joyful obedience this God who loves you so passionately. When you do that, you really will have eternal life because then, and only then, will you really know the God who manifested himself to you in Jesus.