A reflection on the Lectionary Readings for the first Sunday after Christmas Day.
On the first day of my New Testament class in seminary the professor had us write down on a piece of paper our favorite Gospel with a short sentence as to why it was our favorite, seal it in an envelope with our name on it and hand it in. On the last day of class, he returned it to us, still sealed and asked us to open it, read what we wrote and then, as part of our final exam, to discuss, how the gospel we chose could be used to introduce someone who had never really heard the Good News Story to Jesus. The professor did tell us that if our minds had changed over the course of the class, we could use one of the other gospels since he had never seen our answers.
I had written the Gospel according to John on my piece of paper and my mind hadn’t changed. It was and still is my favorite telling of the Good News Story of Jesus. In the three year church lectionary cycle, we don’t spend a year reading through John as we do the others (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) but each year John’s version of the Story is scattered throughout, seasoning the whole of the Story of God that is to shape and guide us as we follow Jesus in our day and time.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
God’s plan for God’s creation wasn’t reset with the birth of Jesus. The coming of the Messiah wasn’t plan B. From the very beginning of all there is, Jesus was, is, has been, and always will be. And the life and light that is Jesus is given to us by the God who pursues us even as we keep trying to make our own way. So much of the time, we begin our understanding of our relationship with God at the point in time where the first humans to walk with God chose to decide for themselves what was good and what was evil. We start with our human choice to damage the relationship rather than the creation of the relationship by God.
The writer of John reminds us that God’s choice to create us in love and by love and for love is the true beginning of the relationship. It is Love as God Loves that is the foundation of all that we are. God’s choice to give us the freewill that we so often misuse shows God’s capacity for unconditional love. God knew we would misuse our freewill and God knew that to learn to love as God loves, we needed to be able to choose for ourselves whether we want to love God, our neighbors, and, yes, our enemies. Love cannot be forced or coerced or controlled. Love can only be given and received.
When we begin our understanding of God with the human choice to go against God’s Way, we begin to lose sight of who and Whose we really are. This misguided understanding is what leads us eventually to the idea that some human beings are better than or worse than others. When we lead with the damaged relationship and base our understanding of God on the wretchedness of humans, we are not seeing the image of God in ourselves or each other. This theology is what enables church leaders to coerce others through fear of a wrathful God rather than lead with Love. This delayed start theology is what gives birth to shame and guilt, of the idea that we have to be ‘good enough’ for God or somehow earn God’s love and pleasure. To start our understanding of our relationship with God with what we humans did is the same misuse of our freewill that caused those first humans to choose their own way instead of God’s Way.
God’s love is good news to all people. The Story of Christmas is the story of God’s pursuit of God’s beloved. Even as God’s people continued to choose their own way, God never gave up on us. God came to be as one of us, the very humans God created, to live as us, to die so that we could know the everlasting life that doesn’t fear death. God’s Love is more powerful than our greatest fears, our biggest blunders, our most dangerous misuses of our freewill, or any of our failures or successes. There is nothing we can do to make God love us any more or any less than God Loves.
God came to us in the most vulnerable way, as an infant, to show us how powerful vulnerability is. God created us to be interdependent beings; to love requires an ‘other’. In God’s Kingdom-on-earth-as-in-heaven, love says that we love each other as we love ourselves and to consider ourselves ‘wretched’ isn’t very loving, is it. When we choose to follow Jesus we are born anew as God’s beloved children. This gift of adoption isn’t earned but given to us by the God who loves us. The best response from us is to live life learning to love more and more like Jesus every day. Like John, we point to the light of God for the glory of the God of love.
I’m not sure exactly how I answered my New Testament professor’s question all those years ago. But I do know that the Gospel according to John is still my favorite and that my understanding of our relationship with God continues to grow as we follow Jesus here and now as beloved children of God. As we approach the new calendar year, I invite you to spend some time with John’s version of the Good News. Listen through the lectionary cycle this year as it peppers the scheduled readings through the church seasons. Open your understanding of who God is and Whose we all are to begin at the beginning of Love. Let God’s Love for you shine the light of love in the dark places of our world.
Mother Nancy's Coffee Thoughts 