Because today is Mother’s Day, I
have to begin with a story about my Mother.
When I was a 8th-grader in Charlotte, Vermont, the principal
of the Charlotte Central School was a man named Larned Ketcham. He was a horse breeder in his off hours, and
his manner with children reflected that.
A tall, solidly-built, square-jawed man with a proud bearing, he used to
appear without warning in the school yard during recess and walk around,
watching keenly everything that happened, and when he saw something amiss he
would put his fingers in his mouth and let out a whistle that made 300 laughing,
yelling children freeze in an instant.
One morning Mr. Ketcham must have decided that there was a general drift
toward unruliness going on, and that it was no longer sufficient merely to intervene
in individual cases; because when the final bus had arrived, and before the
bell rang to mark the beginning of classes, he herded us all into the
cafeteria.
When we were all indoors and seated
he whistled, and the din was instantly replaced with a dead silence. He announced that the talking-to that he was
about to give us was so important that the next child who spoke would spend an
hour after school with him in his office that evening, which was Monday, and
every evening for the rest of the week.
So nobody talked. Nobody, that
is, except me. In the illusory safety of
the far corner of the cafeteria I whispered some wisecrack to my friend Jim
Mack, and from across the large and crowded room I heard the voice of Mr.
Ketcham like the trumpet of doom—“Mr. Green!”
I stammered out a feeble denial, but my fate was sealed. I, who had made it through seven-and-a-half years
of compulsory public education without ever once being sent to the Principal’s
Office, was sentenced to go there for the next five days.
That afternoon, filled with dread,
I walked down to the lobby, and as I watched the other children happily bursting
out of the doors toward the line of buses waiting to take them home, I took the
left turn of the condemned man, and entered the school office. There I was surprised to find Mr. Ketcham in
a relaxed, if not outright friendly, mood.
He let me use his phone to call home and explain to my mother why I
wouldn’t be on the bus, and what time she would have to pick me up. He then made small talk with me for a couple
minutes, after which we spent the rest of the hour in silence, him working at
his desk and me doing my homework in a chair in the corner.
The peace was shattered at 5
o’clock by the arrival of my mother. I
don’t know how much of her outrage was due to the harshness of my punishment,
and how much was because of her inconvenience at having to fetch me home from
school, but she went into battle with all guns blazing, while I sat to one
side, feeling a mixture of relief and embarrassment. Mr. Ketcham offered valiant resistance, but
after manfully weathering a couple of salvos of Katie Green’s fury, he gave me
a look that betrayed the slightest hint of a smile, and then we all knew he was
beaten. I packed my books into my bag,
nodded soberly at the principal’s warning about learning my lesson, and
followed my mother out to the car, my debt to society paid in full.
When somebody tells us that right
now Jesus is with the Father in heaven, interceding on our behalf, this is
often the kind of thing that comes to mind.
But the image of the redeemer pleading with a wrathful God, who must be
talked out of inflicting on us the full punishment we deserve, doesn’t really
fit the one example we have of Jesus’ intercessory prayer.
In John’s Gospel Jesus speaks and
acts as one who is fully conscious of having come from God, and fully confident
that he is returning to God. This is
especially true in the so-called “farewell discourse,” the long speech that he
gives his disciples after supper on the night before his death. In these three chapters, Jesus speaks of his
impending death as if it is just a part—an important and indispensible part,
but just one part—of a whole process of transformation that he calls being
“glorified.” And he speaks of this
process that is about to take place as if it were already accomplished. In the 17th chapter, which is
where today’s gospel lesson comes from, Jesus completes his farewell discourse
with a prayer, a prayer in which he speaks as one who has already left the
world, who even now is standing face to face with God.
I don’t think that this is an
accident. John tells the story this way
on purpose. He wants his community to
understand that the way that they think
and talk about Jesus, the relationship they have with him at the end of the 1st
century, or whenever it was that the Gospel was written, is a relationship that
Jesus himself anticipated and initiated. The story of Jesus that John tells his church
is not an invention after the fact, but flows directly out of Jesus’ own words,
his own works, his own purpose. And these
words, these works, this purpose do not exist only in the church’s memorial,
but they live in the present, hidden from sight, in God.
To the ones who reject him, the
story of Jesus is only lies and broken promises—a man who claimed to be the Messiah
but who failed and died. But to those
who believe in him, the rejection and the death are only the beginning of a journey
that takes Jesus from life to death, to resurrection, to ascension to the glory
of the heavenly throne, from which he sends the gift of the Holy Spirit. And
these events are the key that unlocks the meaning of a much greater story. They retell the great story of the creation
of human beings in the divine image, of our misuse of our freedom, and of God’s
undying love for us, of God’s desire to restore us to our place as partners
with him in the creation of a sacred universe.
The journey of Jesus into glory is what proves that this is no myth, no
mirage, no human fabrication of any kind, but the true history of the world.
John’s Gospel says that Jesus knew from
the beginning that he was the person in whom God’s age-old story would be
renewed and fulfilled. He also knew that
his rejection and murder would be the fork in the road. Those who took his death as proof that Jesus
was wrong and his story was over, would go on as before. The world’s story of itself would continue,
repeating its cycles of violence, its conquests and revolutions, its booms and
busts, its spectacular achievements and just as spectacular catastrophes. But on the night before his death Jesus tells
his disciples that along with all of that something new would be happening, a
new turn in God’s story of the world, that was beginning right at that very
moment in that very room.
He told them that from the vantage
point of one who had already renewed and fulfilled the story. He told it to them as one who was already
reconciled to the Father, as co-creator of a sacred universe. He told it to them as one who had already
entered paradise and stood face-to-face with God. And standing there he had already begun his
ongoing work, the work that he was doing when John wrote his Gospel, the work
he still does now as I stand here preaching and you sit there listening, the
work that he does whenever we pronounce his name with faith, hope, and
love. It is the work he does for us and
through us when we pray, when we break the bread and drink the cup as he
instructed, when in humble service we love each other as he loved us. It is the work of revealing to the world its
own true glory, and he will do it, and we will do it with him, until the
world’s story of itself and God’s story of the world are the same story once
again.
No comments:
Post a Comment