Reflections from The Hill – Names – John 17.9-17

It can be tough living with a name you’ve inherited. Someone else’s reputation can be a millstone or some other inconvenience to you. Children who grow up with famous parents know what I’m talking about.

For example, the famous Aussie cricketer, Don Bradman, had a son called John who, for many years, called himself “John Bradson” because he couldn’t stand the pressure of being known as The Don’s son.

The person doesn’t have to have world-class fame either. If you go to a school where your older brother and sister was dux – or villain – it can be a hard task just establishing your own place. Often, especially in clergy families, knuckles have been known to be helpful.

On the other hand, names can be a bonus. All sorts of doors can be opened or indiscretions overlooked for the son or daughter of a well-known person. Names can count in this world sometimes.

So I ask: what’s in a name? Most of us wear our moniker well but there are some for whom their name is a particular burden. What’s in a name, indeed? A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, surely.

Well, no. Sorry Mr Shakespeare, any name will not do, not for people anyway.  No. The essential thing about names is that they are connected to identity. They are about who we are and, in today’s Gospel reading, whose we are. 

Why does Jesus pray that we’ll be connected? Because he wants to have the same identity that God first gave him, that’s why. That puts a different kind of slant on things. Our identity is now tied up in God’s identity.

There are a few parts of God’s identity that we could well do to adopt as our own. The first is Reconciler “Protect them in this name you have given me, so that they might be one, just as you and I are one.”

With the rhetoric of reconciliation off the public discourse since the ‘Sorry Speech’, it’s a bit hard to make connections with practical examples. That’s not a bad thing: there are other examples.

It doesn’t take too much imagination, though, to see Jesus speaking up for the original occupants of this country. You don’t have to read much of what Jesus had to say about the relationships between the possessors and the dispossessed to know where he’d stand on the issue of indigenous versus settler peoples in Oz.

Of course, there’s much more to reconciliation than this; even if we start with the Indigenous issue, there’s a long way to go before all the issues to do with reconciliation are dealt with. 

One-ness and Unity among God’s people is not a pipe-dream or even a vague possibility: it’s part of our identity as Christians and its practice is needed all the time. That’s what being tied up with God means.

There’s more. If we adopt God’s identity as seen in Jesus, we’re committing ourselves to a lot of praying. Jesus continues to represent us to God, praying for our well-being, our protection, our strengthening and equipping for the tasks to which he has called us.

Both on Sundays and in our daily prayer, we begin to live into the identity we have inherited from our great high priest and, as we begin to grow into that identity, our actions begin to grow into our prayers.

That’s what “being part of the answer” means. Otherwise there’s not a lot of sense, or use, in praying for anything. The two (prayer and action) go together, just as surely as a singer needs a song. 

If reconciliation and prayer are two bits of our identity as Christians, by implementing both we discover the real miracle of God-with-us. That is, God, who is always real, becomes tangible when our identity shines. We are the Body of Christ.

The most tangible version of this is seen, not only when we gather together Sunday by Sunday (important as that might be), but when we leave that place to be Jesus in the world.

The name we inherit from Jesus Christ is both our security and our mission. We begin to grow into it in the place where Communion happens, and we carry that identity with us as we go out into every area of our normal, everyday, lives. 

The risen Christ continues to pray for us and, with our faith in him, we join his prayer and we grow into the identity he has given us, for there’s something beautiful about that Name.