“I glorified you on the earth having accomplished the work which you have given me to do, and now, Oh Father, glorify me with your own self with the glory which I had with you before the world was.”
Jesus claims that He has faithfully fulfilled the task given to Him by the Father. He has accomplished the work which the Father had given Him to do, and has brought glory to God by what He has done and what He will do, for both His life, teaching and miracles, and the final work on the cross, are part of that task. (Compare how John tells us that ‘we beheld His glory --' - John 1:14). Now He prays that He might be fully restored to His former eternal glory and intimate relationship with the Father. Notice the prayer to be glorified ‘with the Father's own self', which is then defined as being glorified with the glory which He had had with the Father before the world was. The intimacy of this leaves no doubt about the fact that He Himself is on the divine side of reality. He is to receive the glory which is essentially that of the Father, a glory which had previously also been His. It need hardly be said that Jesus' prayer is not a prayer for personal glory, but a deliberate commitment to suffering before He is finally restored to the glory which was His by right, the “glory I had with You before the world existed”. It is difficult to overemphasise the importance of these words here. They remove all doubt about Jesus' essential deity.
He will now go on to pray specifically for the Apostles. They were the only ones present at the Last Supper (Matthew 26:20; Mark 14:17; Luke 22:14) and the exclusion of Judas as the only one lost (v. 13) excludes reference to the wider group of disciples, of whom some would certainly go astray, as others had done before (John 6:66). The prayer is extended to the remainder of the people of God in John 17:20-26.