As soon as Judas left the room, Jesus said,
“The time has come for the Son of Man to enter into his glory, and God will be glorified because of him. And since God receives glory because of the Son, he will soon give glory to the Son. Dear children, I will be with you only a little longer. And as I told the Jewish leaders, you will search for me, but you can’t come where I am going.”
Of course, we know how the story ends; Jesus gets killed the next day, and resurrected Sunday. Now let’s look at this in context: The only person in the room who knows what’s coming next, and how it’ll play out, is Jesus. The rest of them assumed—as they had been—that the Son of Man entering into his glory meant that some freaky End Times style stuff was going to happen: Jesus was going to announce he was the Messiah, angels would pour out of the sky, the Judeans would form a mighty army behind him, and the Romans would be vanquished by the double-edged sword coming from his mouth.
Not crucifixion. Even though Jesus had warned them more than once that it was coming. Like most people, they had selective hearing. They believed what they wanted to about him; whatever made him sound like an ass-kicking warrior who would conquer by might instead of surrender.
But you see, surrender was the only way that anything Jesus says here makes any sense. In what way is God glorified if Jesus whips out a sword and starts destroying Romans? Every conqueror from the beginning of the world has used that tactic. They might have given God (or their local gods) credit for their success, but anyone with a brainstem can notice that maybe their mighty armies, clever tactics, and superior weapons played a factor. In those cases, God got glory purely as lip service. Does anyone nowadays credit God for winning World War II? No; they credit the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union. They credit our resources, tactics, and might. Some folks even blame God for letting Adolf Hitler kill as many people as he did. But God gets little credit for the victory; and little glory.
Jesus and his students had just got finished eating Passover. During that dinner, they remembered—as is part of the Passover ceremony—how Israel became a nation. How it wasn’t through Moses whipping out a sword and destroying Egyptians; he’d tried that already, and it didn’t turn out so well. (Ex 2.11-15) Had that been the means of freeing the Hebrews, the Jews wouldn’t have honored God for it; okay, they might have to a point, but plenty of skeptics would have skipped right past God and glorified Moses. But in the Exodus, there were no armies, no tactics, no weapons. There was nothing that any human did that would have convinced the Egyptians to let a nation’s worth of free labor go. There were only the mighty acts of the LORD; and as a result the LORD got the entire credit for it, and all the glory.
The only way for God to get any glory by what Jesus was about to do, was if what happened next would be done entirely through God’s power. Jesus would have to step completely aside and let the Father do his thing. That would glorify God; and for that reason the Father would glorify the Son for his obedience.
Of course, the disciples’ mindset—that they would form the victorious army behind the conquering Messiah—needed to be shaken out of them, which is why Jesus immediately followed this up with
They still didn’t get this, as Simon Peter soon demonstrated. Quite a lot of the Passion Discourse consists of Jesus trying to get these deeply-embedded End Times myths out of his followers’ minds. The idea of victory and glory through surrender is a very hard one for people to grasp; one that Christians nowadays still struggle with, as we demonstrate every time we get involved in politics, or try to build large institutions, or raise lots of money, or do anything that we might try to give God credit for, but pagans understandably point out how it looks like we did it ourselves. Yeah, God can use these achievements for his purposes, but he gets glory when we step back in surrender and let him achieve. Only then will people respond in wonder, “I don’t see how you did that,” and pay attention, however briefly, to God. Only then will anyone other than Christians give him credit.
So ask yourself—and ask Jesus—“How can I put this concept into practice?”