John 17:1–11 takes place on Passover night, likely just after midnight in Easter Week, during the Last Supper and only hours before Jesus is arrested. This is before Gethsemane, before the trials, and well before the Passover lambs are slaughtered on Friday afternoon. Jesus and his disciples are still in the upper room and have not yet left for Gethsemane.
The symbolism here is important. Although this happens at Passover, Jesus shows that he fulfils more than one of Israel’s great feasts. He is the true Passover, bringing deliverance, and he also fulfils Yom Kippur, bearing sin and accomplishing atonement.
How does Jesus fulfil BOTH the Passover and the Atonement
Because His death is bigger than any single Old Testament ritual.
✔ He fulfils Passover because
- Dies at Passover
- Called the Lamb of God
- His blood brings deliverance
- Creates a new covenant with the people
✔ why He fulfils Atonement
- Here, he acts as the High Priest
- Offers His own blood
- Opens the true Holy of Holies
- Removes sin like the scapegoat
- Cleanses the conscience
However, does not die on the Day of Atonement (which is about 6 months later ). He dies on Passover, while accomplishing the work of Atonement.
He makes that clear. So while he prays atonement prayers to sacrifice an animal, he’s going to offer himself as the sacrifice for the people’s sins, asking God to pass them over, and so he combines both atonement and the Passover. That is the deliverance and the payment of the price for our sin forever, so this part of the story is Jesus combining the roles of the priest in both festivals into one.
This also, of course, means that, in this story, the subject of his prayers is his disciples and his people, rather than the people of Israel.
And that means YOU! You are the subject of Jesus’ prayer, which is why the lectionary places this part of the story in the last week of Easter. Next week is Pentecost, and after that we move into what is, in fact, a total misnomer called ordinary time.
btw Ordinary Time” doesn’t mean “boring time.” It comes from the Latin ordinalis, meaning numbered.
So, it literally means:
“The numbered weeks.” Not “ordinary” as in plain or unimportant.
But the English word ordinary sounds like “nothing special,” which is why it feels wrong. Anglicans have been rolling their eyes at this awful idea that any time with Jesus is ordinary for decades!
But I digress, let’s get back to Jesus and the upper room
Jesus is a man of prayer (you have to talk about Jesus in the present tense). Here, he offers himself as the carrier of our sins forever instead of a bull or a goat. In case your wondering, He isn’t called a Bull because the bull is for the priest’s own sin, and Jesus has no sin; he is called the lamb because he fulfils the role of both the day of atonement sacrifice and the Passover lamb.
So, before fulfilling atonement and Passover roles for us, just before he leaves us Jesus prays for us
In these prayers, Jesus makes three statements and asks God for things after he has left us. So he’s worrying about you , as people on their deathbed sometimes do when they know they won’t be around to protect the ones they love. As he says, he is leaving this world, but his disciples are still in it.
He says that by the authority he has over his people (that’s us btw) he gives us eternal life. So, by being his disciples, God gives us eternal life
Then he states his death will finish the work that God began.
He states that God gave him disciples from this world (so God gave us to him)! You were Given to Jesus by God.
And as he says, he isn’t praying for the world, he is praying for his disciples, “I pray for them. I am not praying for the world, but for those you have given me, for they are yours. 10 All I have is yours, and all you have is mine. And glory has come to me through them.
But his final words for us are “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.”
So this prayer is Jesus worrying about you and asking God to protect you after he has gone. It explains how we got here, what his role is in all this and what your role is; it explains that he does both atonement and Passover, that we were given to him by god, and as we are his, and he has the power to protect us
It explains that Jesus’ death is both the Passover that delivers us from every enemy and the Atonement that forgives every sin.
Two different problems.
Two different solutions.
Jesus deals with both.
Jesus died at Passover rather than on the Day of Atonement because His death is primarily framed in Scripture as deliverance from judgment and slavery, like the Passover lamb, while still achieving everything the Day of Atonement symbolised. Passover is the feast of rescue, not just cleansing, and the New Testament consistently presents Jesus’ death in those Passover terms.
We have been rescued from slavery and freed from the slavery of sin.
By mixing the roles of the priest in these two in this passage, Jesus makes it plain he does both; then his prayer makes it plain you are under God’s protection and that he loves you from heaven.
Then, next week at Pentecost, he sends the Holy Spirit to carry on that work.
So, for a short passage, it carries a lot of water. It makes it plain how much he loves us and how much he wants those who love him to be free from the enemy. Although bound by him, the enemy can, if we enable him, do great damage, but to soften that, as he knew he was leaving you exposed to the enemy, he prayed for you before he died for you.
Notes – famous theologians who support this theory and their appropriate books
| N. T. Wright | The Day the Revolution Began |
| Rowan Williams | The Sign and the Sacrifice |
| Fleming Rutledge | The Crucifixion |
| Michael Gorman | Cruciformity |
| Andrew Rillera | Lamb of the Free |
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