John 17:20-26

I became a preacher because of my mother and the Christmas pageant.

Every congregation, so far as I knew, held a Christmas pageant. With songs and recitations and a bit of acting, the children of the congregation would tell the Christmas story. At the end of the pageant, the elders would hand out bags of peanuts (in the shell), candy, and oranges. 

My mother directed the Christmas pageant in our congregation. There were lots of children, and they all played a part. Some spoke; some sang; some enacted the roles of Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the angels, and the animals in the stable; some melted down in tears; but year after year Jesus was born, the angels sang, and the shepherds visited the stable, and wise men came from afar bringing gifts.

One year when I was still quite small my mother assigned me the welcome speech. Before anything else, before the preacher got up to pray, I was to walk out on the stage and recite my four lines of welcome. My mother knew a thing or two about recitation. She had once competed in a high school declamation contest and taken second in state. She thought she had been robbed.

Well-rehearsed when I walked on to the stage, as my mother had instructed, I summoned up my biggest voice and announced, sans microphone, my welcome to the crowd. The preacher was up next. Making a bit of small talk and probably amused by the little kid with a big voice who had preceded him, he said, “Someday that kid is going to be a preacher.” 

Or so I was told by my mother. Often. I don’t actually remember what happened that evening. I have an image of it, but I’m fairly certain that what’s in my head was put there by my mother telling me the story over and over again, aided by my imagination. She told me the story to encourage me to do what the preacher had predicted: become a preacher myself. And, though not without investing considerable effort to escape, I did just that. The story became integral to my call.

Stories get into us. And when they do, they shape who we are. In John 17:20-26, Jesus prays that the story gets into us: “Not only for these [his first followers] do I pray,” says Jesus, “but for those who trust their word about me.” We are those being addressed, those who have heard the Easter stories and trust them. They get into us.

And when they get into us, we see life differently. Consider what Jesus says in this prayer. At the beginning—the part not included in today’s gospel reading—Jesus speaks of finishing: “I [Jesus] have glorified you [the Father] on earth by finishing the work you have given me to do” (17:4). It’s this finished work that Jesus offers to the Father. “Glorify the Son,” he says, speaking of himself in Son of Man language (see Daniel 7:13-14) that the Son may glorify you” (17:2). 

The language Jesus is speaking is the language of martyrdom—a tradition stretching back through the Maccabean period (see 2 Maccabees 7, along with the commentary in 4 Maccabees 17; Daniel 7:13-14, 12:1-3; and Wisdom 5) to Isaiah 53 and the Suffering Servant. Resurrection appears in this tradition as vindication. Death, tyrants, and evil do not have the last word. The last word is the word of the Lord, and that word is Life.

Which brings me back to our stories. Our stories are often told to us by another, in my case, by my mother. The Easter proclamation is, in this sense, not only the story of Jesus but our story. It’s a promise that our stories are not finally our own but God’s. We can borrow the language of Jesus from this passage: “Father, glorify us as we have tried, best as we can, to glorify you. Or, better, “Father, as we have tried to tell your story well, tell our stories the way they should be told.”

Resurrection is the definitive telling of our stories, as it was for Jesus. To have that story in us relativizes every other telling of the story, including our own. This is a great grace. We are called to do the best we can. The biblical word for this is faith or, better, faithfulness. But our inevitable failures, our lack of perspective, our limited understanding of ourselves and our times—all these are the elements out of which God will construct our story. The grace is in the telling. And the telling belongs to God.

There is a lightness in this. My own sometimes overblown, sometimes despairingly critical, almost always entirely too self-centered estimate of who I am is not actually my story. My story has yet to be told. I look forward to hearing it.