Why Jesus?…

In his own words (part 22)

In John 17, in Jesus’ own words, we see what Jesus lived for, starting in verse 1 when Jesus opens his prayer with: “Father, the time has come.” Meaning, “Father, this is what I’ve been looking forward to, this very time coming up right now.”  

Because up to this point what he’d looked forward to hadn’t happened. All those miracles he’d performed, all those people he’d healed, all those lessons he’d taught, all those crowds who’d followed him around, all the dawning of understanding in his disciples’ heads – all of them meant nothing because the “time” he was talking about hadn’t happened yet.

He made that clear in the first miracle he did in John 2, when his mother told him the wine at the wedding had nearly run out already. His reply to her was rather abrupt: “But what’s that got to do with me? My time has not yet come,” verse 4.

He solved the wine problem anyway, but in his mind it accomplished nothing. Nothing he did, no matter how startling or helpful it was, would have the result he longed for until this crucial time coming up at the end of his life. It didn’t matter what happened to him personally up to that time either. People could try to shut him down, but John 7:30, “no one laid a hand on him, because his time had not yet come.”  

His “time had not yet come” for what, though? Jesus explains in John 12:23, when he tells his disciples, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” He anticipates the time coming when the grand purpose of his life would at last be fulfilled. And we find out what that purpose was in the analogy Jesus gives in verse 24, of a “kernel of wheat that in itself is just a single seed, but if it falls to the ground and dies it can sprout and produce many seeds.” The purpose of all that Jesus accomplished and did in his lifetime, then, would only bear fruit if he died. And his reaction to that? Was it, “Father, save me from this hour,” verse 27? “No,” he says, “it was for this very reason I came to this hour.”  

Because in his death, not his miracles, would what he longed for be made possible for us humans…(continues Wednesday)