Thursday, January 05,
2017
My reflection on the first
chapter of John’s Gospel continues . . .
John 1:2-3
He [the Word] was in the
beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not
one thing came into being.
Keep in mind again that the Word
exists before the beginning of creation itself. Jesus himself alludes to this
in the High Priestly prayer He offers to the Father before He is taken away to
be crucified: 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. (NRSV translation; emphasis mine).
For us this is a mind-blowing
revelation as it indicates how great is our ultimate destiny; for Jesus,
however, it is a simply natural and basic understanding of who He is and who He
has been back in that mystical realm I suggested you think about yesterday—that
time which existed before the actual creation of the world, before the time
that God created the heavens and the earth
(Genesis 1:1).
And then, the “Big Bang!”? The
work of creation beginning, and all of it was through Jesus and in Jesus
and Jesus is in all things. ALL THINGS. Everything around you; everyone
around you; the elements which make up all the “man-made” objects we are
surrounded with in the world we live in. The trees and the roots and the birds
and the worms and the wind and the clouds and the ferrets and the rattlesnakes,
the little child whose smile brightened your day recently and the toothless little
old lady in some country on the other side of the world. All of it; all of
them; all of us, and most importantly for your consideration, all of you as
well. Even the diseased or broken parts, even the parts that are breaking down
through the process of aging. And—dare I say it—all of your history as well.
The triumphs and the failures, the strengths and the weaknesses, the yearning
for holiness and the downward pull of concupiscence.
Of course there are some, and
there have been theological schools over the past two millennia, which would
like to look at things dually; that is, who would like to separate out
the good from the bad, the sacred from the profane, the holiness from the
sinfulness, and cast into the darkness what “doesn’t belong.” But God doesn’t
talk about “not belonging.” God includes. God embraces those who are most lost,
God’s Son has a loving conversation with the woman who had several marriages,
Jesus drives away the religious dualists who would demand that the adulteress
be stoned to death; Jesus invites a crucified convicted killer into paradise
the very day He is being put to death.
The older I get, the more simple
it seems, and I know from my own experience that anyone who has done any
serious spiritual work or any work of healing comes to grasp the wonderful
reality that God includes everything, that God makes use of
everything, (even the darkest times of our lives), and that God loves everything. How can he not love what He
has created? How can He not love what was created through and in His Son? Don’t
forget: there is nothing in this world that was not created in Christ and through
Christ.
Jesus is in everything and
everything is in Jesus. Spend the next few days looking around your world with
that new understanding, if it is something new to you. And if you need further
proof, or something to shore up your understanding, go back once again and read
the first two verses of the first chapter of John’s Gospel. It’s all there. How
could we possibly have missed it all these years?
God bless you!
No comments:
Post a Comment