Good Expectations: An Answer To Prayer

 March 29 2026

John 17

         Well, today is a special day on our church calendar called Palm Sunday. On our Lenten journey this day is also known as being the beginning of what is called Holy Week. We call this Sunday, Palm Sunday, because as we read in the twelfth chapter of John that when the crowds that filled Jerusalem heard that Jesus was so to arrive there, they took branches from the palm trees and they went out to meet him, crying out, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, the very king of Israel”! Now what the people were shouting that day was none other than one of their beloved worship songs, the one-hundred and eighteenth Psalm. The cry of, “Hosanna”, was an urgent plea by them to have the Lord come to their rescue. When this, “Hosanna”, is translated for us, we find in the twenty fifth verse of the one-hundred and eighteenth Psalm that it says, “Save us, we pray, O Lord. O Lord, we pray, give us success.” So it seems fitting that this week that we call, “Holy”, would begin with a humble prayer to God asking him to save them so that they might prosper. 

Yet, even though this seems to be a sincere plea by the people of Jerusalem, after we pause for a moment and consider what they were asking from this Jesus, this one they desired to be their king, we discover that their request for success may actually reveal that they simply did not know the goodness of God. They longed for God to prosper them, which meant that they wanted their nagging appetites to be satisfied, that the pleasure they sought from the latest charm might be theirs to experience and that, at last, the world would come to honor the people of God for they now understood that their God was mighty to save. So while their cries as they waved their branches at their passing king seemed simply to be an act of worship, their words though, would set the stage for what would happen throughout this week that we strangely call, “holy”. I mean, how can this week be considered a sacred and consecrated time when on Friday this same king who entered to shouts of, “Save us”, would not be able to even save himself, dying a cruel death upon a criminal’s cross.

Now it is very important for us to understand, that Jesus ending up on the cross was not because he has been caught up in forces beyond his control. Yes, those very same people who welcomed Jesus into their city with prayer and song would be the very same people who shouted out, “Crucify him, crucify him.” How easy it would be to stand back and conclude that Jesus had simply got caught up in the local politics which led to a mob mentality which could not be stopped, this is why Jesus was crucified. Well, in John’s account of the good news of Jesus this wrong idea is soundly refuted. The cross, far from happening because things just got out of control, actually happened because the cross was an answer to a prayer of Jesus. Now, we have to pause for a moment when we make such a claim for admittedly it is rather shocking to consider the cross to be just that, an answer to prayer. I mean, have you ever prayed a prayer where the answer to that prayer was that you would give your life as an act of love? John calls us to consider just such a possibility

The problem, of course, is that for most of us, the prayer shouted by the crowds when Jesus entered into Jerusalem, prayers for success and prosperity, are what are considered to be a, “normal”, way to pray. The reason for this is that we believe that success and prosperity are the hallmarks of what is thought to be a good life. Now if you have been paying attention during this season of Lent, what we have been looking at in these series of messages, called, “Good Expectations”, is that what we expect when we say we desire the good life, can vary depending on just who it is that defines what this good life is. If we listen to our appetites, or our longings or our desire for honor from those around us, then, yes, the good life most certainly will look like success and prosperity. If this is what the good life looks like to us then when we come before God in prayer we will do so with shouts of, “Save us, give us success! Save us give us, prosperity!”. But if we believe that Jesus has been sent by the Father from heaven to us so that we at last might know good as God defines what good is, then good will look very different than what we normally think of being good. Jesus teaches us, in the fifth chapter of Matthew, the sixth, seventh and eighth verses that the goodness of God is one who hungers and thirsts for righteousness, one who continually offers mercy and one whose heart is pure in their devotion to God, seeking only his honor. When this goodness defines our life then what is promised to us is that we will be satisfied, that we will receive mercy and that we will see God. So when we live out the goodness of God, then we no longer have to pray to be satisfied because we can be certain that with God we will find contentment. And when we offer mercy always and only, then we no longer have to pray for God to be merciful for we can be certain that mercy will be given to us by God. Likewise, when our heart is pure, having no hatred but only love, then we do not have to pray for eternal life because we have the blessed assurance that we will live continually before the face of God. 

         So, what Jesus has revealed to us about the goodness of God radically transforms our prayer life. Now, the prayer that resounds in this Holy Week, is the prayer spoken by Jesus. There we see Jesus, falling on his face in anguish, crying out, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not as I will, but your will be done.” Here the cross is clearly seen as a choice that Jesus makes, a decision in a moment of crisis where the demands of love must be fulfilled in order to do what is desired by the Father. Is it plain to us just how vastly different this prayer of Jesus is from the cries of the palm-wavers who sought only their success and prosperity? Jesus here seeks only what his Father desires, never even concerned about his own desires.

         Now, what we also must know is that this prayer of Jesus is not just a prayer that he alone can pray. While we watch him there in the garden, we do so not as mere spectators but rather, as his students. I mean, could you not hear in this prayer of Jesus, an echo of his very first teaching about prayer that he taught to us up there on the mountain side? Do you not remember that Jesus told us then when we pray, we are to pray like this: “Our Father in heaven, holy be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, here on earth just as in heaven. Give us today to be the bread of life. And forgive us our debts as we forgive those who are indebted to us. Lead us not into hard testing but instead, deliver us from evil.” So, Jesus, there in the garden is praying that his Father’s will or desire be done, here on earth just as it is done in heaven. And what follows in his crucifixion is  the very petitions of the prayer that he taught to us. Jesus gave himself to be broken in order that he might be for us the very bread of life. Jesus poured out his life as an act of mercy so that we might enter into a life of mercy and forgiveness. And Jesus suffered the hard testing of the cross, yielding his very life into the hands of his Father so that he might be safely delivered out of the evil of this world.

         So perhaps it is becoming clearer to us that the cross was indeed an answer to prayer as the gospel of John suggests. Yet, I believe that John wants us to see just where this prayer Jesus prayed in the garden had its beginnings. You see, John wants us to ask, “But what about the first part of the prayer that Jesus taught to us? You know, the part that says, “Our Father, holy be your name, your kingdom come…”, yes, when did Jesus pray these words we are right to wonder. Well, in the seventeenth chapter of John, we are given an expanded version of these first few words, “Father, your name be holy…”. I believe that John does so because he realized that Jesus yielding his life to do the will of his Father was not a spur of the moment decision. No, Jesus had prepared himself to make just such an action earlier that night when he celebrated the Passover meal with his friends. At the conclusion of this meal, this Lord’s supper, Jesus is overheard, praying to his Father, this is what is recorded for us in the seventeenth chapter of John’s gospel.

         Now, this prayer found in the seventeenth chapter has long been intriguing to me. I have numerous books which have studied this prayer in depth or have used these words of Jesus as a source for meditation. All of these years I never understood fully as to what this prayer meant until God made me aware that in a veiled sort of way, that here was Jesus ending this meal with the beginning of his prayer. And John wants to make certain just what we are saying when we often begin with, “Our Father, holy be your name…” So, as expected Jesus begins his prayer with words about the Father. The Father is the one Jesus can expect who will glorify his work in the end. Jesus knows this to be true because the Father is the one who has placed all authority into the hands of Jesus. This means that Jesus is able to give eternal life to all whom the Father gives to him. Now, what Jesus says next about this eternal life is rather startling because he tells us that eternal life is knowing the Father, the only true God and knowing Jesus, the one the Father has sent to us. So eternal life, far from being just some passive gift is instead an interactive relationship with God where we become intimate with our Heavenly Father and with Jesus, the one sent to us so that we might be able to know our Heavenly Father. As we said earlier in this series, the way that we come to know good is that we listen to the blessings that he gives to us, and we obey those teachings and when we do so we come to know the goodness of God as something that lives in and through us. So it makes sense that just after partaking this communion with his disciples, the breaking of the bread and the drinking of the cup, that Jesus would remind his listeners that we do so in order to know the true God and Jesus the one he sent, for this is eternal life. We know that through his body broken as seen in the bread which was torn, that Jesus, as the Son of God, has forever united himself with the broken and crushed people of this world. God is not only found in the highest of the heavens as we would expect but he is also found in the lowest places with the least of those people. So we should not expect that God will be found among the powerful, the arrogant and those wise in the ways of the world for this is not where God desires to be. No, as the cup so quietly speaks to us, God seeks out those who are broken, those whose lives have been taken from them, and God pours out his life for them.

         Now, we are to know that God is the God of the broken and crushed people, and that our God comes to these dying souls to offer them life not just because this is what Jesus has taught to us but also because we have been obedient to his commands as well. We are to know God as being a God of the lost and the lowly because when we went to the lost and the lowly we found that God was already there working before we arrived. We are to know that our God is a God who gives life because when we shared this life that God has given to us we discovered that instead of having less life we instead ended up with more life, so that the more we gave the more was indeed given back to us.

         What is expected when we obey Jesus is that we will experience who God really is, what is his unchanging nature upon which his kingdom is established. You see, our God has a reputation. When people consider God they are to know just who he really is, a certain way of being with us that is unchanging throughout all human experience. This eternal way of God being with us is what the Bible refers to as being the name of God. In this respect, the name of God is to be like a person’s reputation, or what they might call, their good name. God does have a good name, and this is found at the beginning of John’s gospel, the first chapter, the seventeenth verse. There we learn that the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. This, “grace and truth”, that are referred to here, are the Greek translation for what is spoken of as being steadfast love and faithfulness, in the Old Testament. This steadfast love and faithfulness is what God considers his name because this the very essence of who our eternal God is, was, and always will be, what God means when we call him the I AM.

         Jesus made this name, this steadfast love and faithfulness known to us through what he taught about the goodness of God. Jesus calls us to hunger and thirst for righteousness, to ache for a world where all are treated as equals because God has always had a steadfast love for all people. It is the faithfulness of God which has given life not only to those faithful to him but also to those who oppose him. Jesus calls us to be merciful only because God first, by his mercy loved us without judgment. By his mercy, God was faithful to us when our faith failed. And Jesus calls us to have a pure heart so that it might reflect the heart of our Father whose heart has always been pure in His love and devotion to us.

         It is this name of our God, that he is a God of steadfast love and faithfulness, this is how, Jesus tells us, that the Father will guard us from evil. In this world where evil is so rampant, what anchors us is that we now know with absolute certainty that our God is a God of  a love which stands with us, a faithfulness that anchors our life. This is the truth we discover when we take the words of Jesus, and we obey them and live them out, and there we find our God’s reputation is upheld. This is why Jesus insists that the Father not take us out of this evil world because through our doing the good taught to us by Jesus, the name of God is made holy. Holy is our God, a goodness without blemish, so very unlike this goodness of this world. So when this goodness is now seen living in us, people will encounter what makes a holy God so other-than-this-world. Jesus, in the nineteenth verse, says, “For their sake, I consecrate myself, so that they may be made holy in truth.” This, then is the very reason why Jesus went to the garden and prayed that the will of the Father be his will to do. Jesus, desired to do the will of his Father because Jesus also know that the very reputation of his Father was on the line. How would the world know the name, the reputation of God, without Jesus allowing himself to be broken? How would the world ever know that God is a giver of life, a life more abundant? The name of God can only be holy as those who know God become holy through obedience to his word. In saying that he would do the will of his Father, Jesus was consecrated, made holy by being in the truth through his obedience. 

         Yet, Jesus is not the only one consecrated that night for all who follow Jesus must know that by his death on the cross Jesus has opened up the way for all of us to be made holy through our obedience to the truth. As Jesus closed out his prayer he prayed to his righteous Father, and we should wonder, do I hunger and thirst for his righteousness? As Jesus then spoke about making known the name of the Father, that he is the God who stands fast in his love and faithfulness for us always, I wonder, do we love God like this as well?  Oh, may the love that led Jesus to the cross be the love which is found living in us, now and always! Amen!