A boy chooses a rock
Handles it,
feeling its good weight
Knowing he will throw it
Far out
Into the lake
**
The seventeenth chapter of the Gospel of John, opens with this sentence:
“After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come…”
Did you catch that?
It is easy to miss, but I don’t want you to miss it.
Jesus “looked up to heaven and said, “Father…”
So take note, please. When Jesus speaks, in this passage, he is not teaching the disciples.
He is not healing the sick.
He is not debating with the Pharisees.
He is not speaking in any of the ways that we are accustomed to hearing him speak.
At this moment, he is talking directly to God.
In other words… he is praying.
Jesus… is praying…
and we are listening in.
This makes me a little uncomfortable.
It would be one thing if Jesus was having a conversation at the next table in a coffee shop and you happened to overhear.
Eavesdropping is kind of a no-no, but a coffee shop is a casual place, and chances are, the conversation is light, so you can kind of get away with it, if you are not too obvious about it.
But prayer?
Prayer is serious.
Not only that, it is intimate.
Prayer is different from everyday speech.
Isn’t it?
Prayer is weighted with our cares, brimming with our hopes, strewn, here and there with our deepest fears. There is nothing frivolous about it… nothing extra. We fill our prayers with our selves, and we earnestly hope that God will accept us in spite of everything.
Prayer is intentional. We don’t do it because we want to, but because we need to.
**
A quiet, but terrible
weight that settles in
among the dark pines
as the day grows old.
**
It is important to add that there are different kinds of prayer…
There is the prayer that we do together, when we worship in community…
and there is the prayer that each of us does when we are alone.
These are very different.
Praying together, we express the concerns that we have in common.
Likewise when we pray alone, we express our personal needs.
Personal prayer, then, is between me and God. I hope that you don’t overhear! Really, I’d rather you didn’t. The prayer that I do when I am alone, is mine in the deepest sense. It is me, trying to be true.
Trying to be real.
Trying, as hard as I can, to be me, before God.
If you happen to overhear me, at such a time, I would feel embarrassed, and depending upon the circumstances, I might feel a little bit violated.
Disrespected.
So that’s why I feel a little bit uncomfortable about the first 11 verses of Chapter 17 of John’s gospel.
We are eavesdropping on Christ’s personal prayer.
These words are between Jesus and God.
It’s not really our business.
**
The sky, heavy
with moving clouds.
Somewhere out
over the distant ridges
the deep murmur
of thunder.
**
But hold on a second.
Are we really eavesdropping on Jesus praying?
If this is a personal prayer, is there any way that we can really know what Jesus, in his heart of hearts, is expressing to God?
When we read and interpret these words, it is worth remembering that they are not a word-for-word accurate record of Christ’s prayer. How could they be? There were no tape recorders in the 1st century. This was not a recorded zoom call. I’m sure that Jesus prayed… but there were no AI bot listening in and taking minutes.
Well.
In that case maybe it’s not so uncomfortable after all.
We’re not overhearing Christ’s prayer. We are overhearing the prayer that the author of John’s Gospel constructed when he tried to imagine what Christ would have prayed at this moment.
We tend to forget this – that there was a significant gap in time between the events of Christ’s life, and when the gospel writers recorded their versions of the story.
There is a whole discipline of Biblical studies, known as “textual criticism” that focuses on where and when different versions of the texts appeared. The front of this morning’s bulletin shows a fragment of John’s Gospel (chapter 18:31–33) that was discovered in Egypt in 1935. This humble looking piece of papyrus, known as St John’s fragment is the oldest known fragment of the New Testament. It is dated around 125 A.D. From this, and other evidence, scholars think that the Gospel of John was written between 90-100 AD.
If we accept these scholarly conclusions, we can speculate that when the writer of John’s gospel imagined and composed the prayer that Owen just read for us, he was trying to do something roughly equivalent to you or I reconstructing, in 2026, a prayer that might have been on the lips of Amelia Earhart when she was lost at sea in 1937.
When we read the Bible as a document that exists in history, we learn about God’s interaction with not one, but three different moments in human history.
The first moment, of course, is the time of Christ’s life – the moment that the gospel is telling us about.
The second moment is the moment in history when the writer of the gospel sat down to write. The moment when, for whatever reason, that writer felt compelled to do their part to keep Christ’s story alive in the world.
And the third moment is the moment in history when the story is read.
In other words, now.
You can take almost any passage from the Bible, and, with a little bit of study, gather some pearls of wisdom from each of these layers of history.
This passage is no exception.
Allow me to show you.
**
The surge of the tide
Eternity’s glorious weight, pushing up
against the headlands,
settling
into the blood.
**
You don’t have to be a Ph.D in Biblical studies to notice something unique about this morning’s reading.
There is a certain word – the word “glory”, (and its variations, glorified and glorifying) that appears six times in these 11 verses.
- So let’s use this word, and see what the three layers of the text’s history reveal.
Let’s start with the most familiar layer of history – our own.
What does the word “glory” mean to us, when we read it?
Here are some of the meanings that the Miriam-Webster on-line dictionary offer when I look up the word “glory”:
The word “glory” can mean “Praise, honor, or distinction extended by common consent.” We are familiar with this one: “Glory” be to God.”
It can mean: “Something that secures praise or renown” as in: “the glory of a brilliant career”
It can mean “A state of blissful exaltation.” “When Jess plays the piano she is in her glory!”.
It can mean “Great achievement or beauty “… the glory that was Greece…” or “What a glorious day!”
And finally, it can mean: the promise of eternal life: “She has gone to Glory.”
These definitions show that we, readers of the English language in 2026, interpret the word “glory” in terms of success, achievement, beauty and fulfillment.
“Glory,” to our ears, has certain religious qualities – we use it often during our worship services. It is also sometimes used to describe certain kinds of military valor. When it expresses personal achievement, it also fits nicely into the world view of capitalism, where personal dignity is measured by wealth and success.
Glory, in our sense, seems to be a way that we describe identity – in particular, we use it as a way to express admiration for people we honor and respect.
It is fitting, certainly, that we use this word for Jesus – a person who we honor above all others.
But what happens when we read this word in the context of Christ’s prayer – or rather the prayer that the gospel writer wrote for Christ.
“Father, the hour has come; (Jesus prays) glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you
Jesus asks God to give him glory. He prays that if God gives him glory, he, Jesus, will give it right back to God.
Is Jesus asking God for praise? For honor, or distinction? That’s what it sounds like to us. Does Jesus need some kind of special Divine validation? A heavenly diploma? Is he like the Scarecrow asking Oz for some brains?
But if this is what Jesus means, why does he say that he will give it back to God? Does God need it?
I don’t know what to think about this. When it comes down to it, I don’t think we usually use the word “glory” in this way – as something that is given. Glory seems to be something we either have, or something we earn.
Our layer of history is kind of confusing.
Maybe we’ll have better luck with the layer of history when the gospel was first written. How does our word show up in 100 AD?
**
After her long labor
A mother cradles her newborn in her arms
for the first time.
Feeling her child’s breath
Feeling her child’s perfect weight
This new,
uncontainable
love.
**
When the Gospel of John was first written, the word that we read as “glory” appears as the Greek word “Dokéo (δοκέω).”
According to Strong’s Dictionary of Biblical Greek, the Greek word Dokéo originates from the word Dok-o which means “to have an opinion, to seem…”
Dokéo, at first glance, sounds a lot less exciting and flattering than our word “glory.”
That said, it Dokéo does seem to lean toward the positive. Strong’s says that
Dokéo expresses the act of forming an opinion, judging that something “seems” a certain way, or considering something to be true.
Dokeo, then, is not just any opinion… it is an opinion that moves toward what is true.
Here is something else from Strong’s:
Whether exposing faulty conclusions, inviting reflection, or recording Spirit-led decisions, the word Dokéo consistently confronts the gap between human impression and God’s reality.
Wow! That’s interesting!
So when the gospel writer chose the word Dokéo, he was not, as we 21st century Americans assumed, talking about praise and honor. He was talking about an opinion of truth that tries to confront the gap between human understanding, and divine reality.
So this layer of history offers us a different reading of Christ’s prayer.
“Father, the hour has come; (Jesus prays) give your Son an opinion that is true, so the Son may confront the gap between what we humans think we know and what You, Oh God, know to be real…
Glory and Dokéo are so different!
How impoverished we would be if, in our hubris, we neglected that second layer of the text’s history!
**
At midnight
In winter’s depth
The falling snow
contains
God’s complete
silence
**
Our final task, this morning, is to figure out – if that is possible – what we can learn from the first layer of history – the moment when Christ himself interacted with God.
We read the English word “Glory.” The writer of John’s gospel wrote the Greek word Dokéo. Christ did not speak English or Greek. Christ probably spoke Aramaic – a language that is very similar to the Hebrew of antiquity.
When Greek translators took Hebrew texts and translated them into Greek, they used Dokéo as a translation of the Hebrew word Kavod (כָּבוֹד).
This Hebrew word, Kavod appears over and over throughout the Hebrew Bible.
Bibles that appear in the English language almost invariably rely on the word “glory” to translate both Dokéo and Kavod. But unlike “glory,” Kavod cannot be inherent to you and me. We may be able to sense it – to absorb it, but it does not come from us.
It comes only from God.
The literal meaning of Kavod is weight.
God’s profundity that lies in all things –
“Father, the hour has come; (Jesus may have prayed) give your Son… The weight of a stone in a child’s hand
The darkness among pines at dusk
The sound of thunder
The surge of the tide
The breath of a newborn.
The hush of snow falling…
so the Son may know your real weight
and return to You…
Amen.