Let’s look at John 17, Jesus prays what’s often called His High Priestly Prayer.
He says things like, “Father, the hour has come; glorify Your Son that Your Son may glorify You.” (v.1) “I have finished the work You gave Me to do.” (v.4) “Glorify Me in Your presence with the glory I had with You before the world began.” (v.5) At first glance, this sounds like one person talking to another. But Scripture also says, “I and the Father are one.” (John 10:30) “He who has seen Me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9) New follower’s of Christ may ask, how can He be one with the Father, and yet pray to Him? The answer lies in Jesus’ twofold nature. During His life on earth, Jesus was unifying His human with the Divine, a process he calls glorification. Jesus was born from Mary with a human nature which was able to be tempted, to suffer, to grow. He also had a Divine nature from the Father, the Divine Soul within Him. When Jesus prayed, He wasn’t talking to a separate being, He was expressing the communication between His human consciousness and His Divine essence. Think of it as the human part reaching upward, fully aligning with the Divine part, the final stages of transformation. The Lord in the world made His Human Divine from the Divine in Himself, and by this made himself one with the Father. So in John 17, Jesus’ prayer is part of His final glorification, the human fully surrendering to and becoming one with the Divine. By the end of this process (especially at the resurrection), there’s no longer separation. The “Son” is glorified, the “Father” is fully revealed within Him. This is why Jesus can say, “The Father is greater than I” (John 14:28) speaking from His humanity, and also “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me” (Matthew 28:18) after his glorification. The prayer in John 17 is a window into God’s love for humanity, love so deep that He entered our condition, prayed through our weakness, and lifted human nature into oneness with Himself.
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For those that say you can not pray to an impersonal essence. This critique is correct that essence alone cannot hear, respond, or actualize a conscious request. That is a valid philosophical point. But the above position does not require defending the idea that Jesus was praying to an impersonal essence. That is not actually what is being claimed. The Divine is personal. Fully, completely, and genuinely personal. Divine love thinks, perceives, responds, and acts. The Father is not an abstraction or an impersonal ground of being. The Father is the infinite divine Person, conscious, loving, and fully capable of hearing and responding. What is being argued is not that Jesus prayed to an essence rather than a person. It is that the Father and the Son are not two separate persons but two dimensions of one divine Person, in the same way that a human being has an inmost soul and an expressed outer nature without being two people. The analogy of a human being actually helps here. When a person’s conscious mind reaches toward their deepest interior convictions in a moment of profound decision, something real is happening between two dimensions of the same person. The deeper self is genuinely personal and genuinely responds to that reaching. This is not communication between an impersonal essence and a person. It is communication within a single personal being across its own interior dimensions. The Father hears because the Father is genuinely personal. The unity with the Son does not eliminate that personhood. It is the fullness of that personhood being expressed through a human form that was in the process of being completely unified with it.
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