Where I Am

Scripture — John 17:20-26 (NRSV)

Jesus prayed for his disciples, and then he said. “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.

“Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me. I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”

Devotion

My oldest child is a senior in high school, and we recently attended the senior class awards ceremony. My husband and I are both deeply steeped in the liberal arts, with PhD’s in history, and careers that have involved our expertise in English and music as well. I have the greatest respect for folks in STEM fields—my paternal grandfather was a chemist with a PhD from the University of Illinois, one of my uncles had a PhD in math and was a computer programmer (at his funeral, one of his friends said in his eulogy, “Bill was my go-to-guy on string theory,”), and my dad was a chemist before he became a United Methodist pastor. But I myself am not gifted in any remotely STEM way. So I went in expecting my kid to receive awards in English, creative writing, and drama. But then they called out my kid’s name for the precalculus award.

Me: “You didn’t get that from me.”
Kid: “I got that because [other person] and I are the only two seniors in the class who turn in our work.”
Me: “You have to understand—in high school I found precalculus too hard so I dropped out of it and took algebra for people who weren’t going to college, which was somewhat confusingly called ‘College Algebra.’”
Kid: “Around here they call that TRANSITIONAL Algebra.”

All of that is a long prelude to the fact that I easily get completely lost whenever I arrive at one of these passages in Scripture that reads like algebra, or maybe geometry. (When I wrote about this gospel three years ago, I talked about someone else who got confused by this passage.) This time I had the idea to actually try to draw it, and I came up with something like this:

And this:

Yesterday’s devotional talked about Jesus actually physically leaving his disciples and ascending to heaven, while giving them the promise that the Spirit would descend on them. But today’s Gospel reading (which is for the upcoming Sunday, the seventh Sunday of Easter) makes it clear that this physical ascension, while necessary for Jesus’s resurrected body to be seated on the heavenly throne and ruling over the universe, doesn’t actually do anything to this mathematical picture.

You can keep that entire circle on earth or you can move it to heaven, and it doesn’t change the fact that we are in the Son and the Son is in the Father and we are supposed to carry that love and that glory to the world. Oh, yeah, and the Spirit is going to help us do that. If you want to know where the Spirit fits into the algebra problem, go back and read John 14:16-17, and you’ll get this picture:

The solution to the algebra problem is that wherever we go, the loving and self-giving Trinity goes with us. And that, as they used to say long ago when I was in seminary, will preach.

Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the High Calling archive, hosted by the unique website of our partners, the Theology of Work Project. Reflection on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: Discovering the Full Meaning of Communion.