ETERNAL KNOWLEDGE

The story of the Last Supper suddenly shifts — the scene pauses, and we find Jesus lifting His eyes to heaven in prayer. Most likely, by the time He uttered these words, Jesus and His disciples had already left the city and were standing under the open sky, bathed in moonlight. It was night. Some of the words of this prayer raise profound questions.

“Father, the hour has come. Glorify Your Son so that the Son may glorify You. You have given Him authority over all people, that He might give eternal life to all You have given Him. And this is eternal life: that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent. I have glorified You 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.”

Jesus often said that He was doing the work of His Heavenly Father. Here, He asks to be glorified — to be given authority, power, and position — in order to magnify the Father’s own glory. The Gospels portray Jesus in a dual light: on one hand, He is fully subordinate to God; on the other, He shares the same divine nature and equality with Him. In this prayer, His submission is especially visible. “You gave Me authority over all things,” He says. But when? How could that be, if Christians have always believed that Jesus Himself is the Creator of the world? Wouldn’t the Creator already possess authority over His creation?

These mysterious words suggest that at some point, Jesus did not yet possess the fullness of divine authority — that the Father, at a certain moment, bestowed upon Him absolute dominion. Why? We do not know. Yet if even Jesus Himself strove toward the purposes set by the Father, then He knew firsthand what it means to grow, to mature, to move toward perfection. Of course, His growth was not moral — not deliverance from sin — but spiritual: an ascent from glory to glory, from fullness to greater fullness. The spiritual realm is never static. It breathes, expands, evolves, and forever calls us upward.

In this prayer, Jesus reveals what He intends to do with His absolute authority: He will grant eternal life to those who believe in Him and in His message. And He defines eternal life in a breathtakingly simple way: to know God. To know the infinite God is to live infinitely. The process of knowing God never ends — it is eternal life itself. And the first step of that journey is faith in Jesus as the living expression of the Father. Jesus is the door that opens onto an endless landscape of light, beauty, warmth, and love.

What glory did Jesus have “before the foundation of the world”? The incarnation of the Son of God remains a mystery beyond comprehension. How could infinite being be contained within human form? We cannot know. Perhaps here, Jesus is expressing His longing to return to that radiant state of existence He once possessed before His earthly life. Our material world, in comparison, must seem dim and colorless beside those realms of light where Christ once reigned — and still reigns — as Lord of all.