One thing we know for sure about our God: Our God is a God of the living, not of the dead. God is life. God is love. God is beauty. God is goodness. God is truth. God doesn't want us to die. God wants us to live. Our God, who loves us from eternity to eternity, wants to give us life for eternity.
When that life was interrupted by our unwillingness to give our full yes to God's love, God sent Jesus to be with us and to say that great yes in our name and thus restore us to eternal life. So let's not be afraid of death. There is no cruel boss, vengeful enemy, or cruel tyrant waiting to destroy us - only a loving, always forgiving God, eager to welcome us home.
(With thanks to the Henri Nouwen Society)
Jesus said, "Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent." (John 17.1-3) Eternal life is for us as Christians a present possession, as well as a future promise.
For me this is at the very heart of the Gospel: we wait, in this Advent season, for the coming of our Lord, for his Kingdom to come, on earth as it is in Heaven; and yet we are living in the Kingdom now in our Christian lives. We wait "...for adoption, the redemption of our bodies" (Romans 8.23) and yet, as we know God in Scripture, and his Son Jesus in his body, the Church, in the Eucharist, in the eyes of our fellow humans, in all Creation, we have eternal life now, and all its wonders and mercies are ours, however dark the world around us may become.
"There is no cruel boss, vengeful enemy, or cruel tyrant waiting to destroy us - only a loving, always forgiving God, eager to welcome us home." Sometimes, the only way to discover the truth of that fact in our own lives is to live through times we would never wish to live through, to have the very thing we feared actually happen, and then to find God's mercy waiting for us at the bottom of the dark.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who knew something about bad times, wrote, "A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes - and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent."
2 comments:
Beautiful, and I love your comments as well. God bless. +
Darkness, even as we wait for the light, is sometimes overpowering. Thank you for the quotes and thoughts.
Post a Comment