Love and Light: A Meditation on John 3 for Holy Trinity Sunday

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son,

 that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world;

but that the world through him might be saved.

 

He that believeth on him is not condemned:

but he that believeth not is condemned already,

because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world,

and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.

 

Jesus’ dialogue with Nicodemus in John 3 began with a teacher of Israel sneaking under cover of darkness in order to speak with Jesus.  He, and others of his ruling class of religious teachers, knew that Jesus had to have come from God, because they also knew from the testimony of Moses that no man could work the wonders Jesus did without being in fellowship with God.  Jesus didn’t make it easy for Nicodemus, nor did He respond to his flattering platitudes, but rather pointed Nicodemus to the Truth which saves an already condemned human race:  the love of God incarnate.  Jesus was more than one of the great Prophets of antiquity, who struggled against their own sinful desires so as to abide in the Word and Will of God; rather, Jesus was and is the very Word and Will of God made flesh, who would work out the salvation of the world through His life, death, and resurrection.  The saving love of God is as real as God Himself, and that incarnate Love brings the Light of Truth into a dark and dying world.  The only reason the world has to hate or flee from the Light and Love of God, is that they prefer their evil be cloaked in darkness, and thus they repudiate the Love of God to remain condemned in the darkness of their wicked desires.

 

The Truth is something every sane person should be interested in, because Truth corresponds to reality; i.e., what is real is also true, from the subatomic composition of all matter and energy in the universe, to the mystery of our own lives in this present world.  Descartes and other philosophers grappled with variations on the maxim that to perceive one’s existence is to identify the objective reality that they do, in fact, exist—and by extension, there must be a real world out there that we exist within, and that can be at least partially known as we explore it.  Natural Philosophy which gave rise to modern science depends upon the rational connection between Truth and Reality, just as any engineer, practical mathematician, physicist, or chemist must explore the truth of what is real if they hope to build, quantify, test, or compose mixtures that produce useful results.  So, too, does our God, the fountain from which flow both material and spiritual realities, who is Himself the ground of Wisdom and Reason, engage His creatures in the Truth of their existence as well as revealing His own.  There can be only one true God, and it is He who comes to His people to reveal Himself by His Word and Spirit.

 

What God reveals to us may not be comfortable to hear, and hard to embrace.  He comes to a broken world of fallen men, and tells them that their bondage to evil and death is a work of their own hands—of their original repudiation of their created reality, chasing the prideful and deceptive words of the devil, rather than abiding in the Light and Love of His Word.  The curse inherited is as real as the death all people must one day experience, just as is the deeper reality that separation from God by rebellion against the Author of Life is to condemn oneself to eternal death.  Man, though created good and possessing many good attributes from the image of his Maker in which he was formed, is hopelessly twisted in all his powers, with not one remaining that can save him.  Like King David, we must all confess that we were conceived in sin, and with St. Paul conclude that there is none authentically righteous in the world by their own strength or merit.  When the Light and Love of God dawn upon such a dark and dismal landscape as ours, we face once again the reality of our condition stripped bare of its pretenses, and the choice to remain bound in our evil, or to embrace the incarnate, saving Love of God in His only begotten Son.  These are the inescapable realities of man, and the unfathomable mercies of the King of all Creation.

 

Yet if we were to abide in the Light and Love of God, we must return to His Word and Will, rejecting all the deceptions, lies, and insanity of our present darkness.  There is no darkness or rejection of reality in God, just as no lie has any place in the presence of Truth.  He has revealed Himself to the world as our Creator, the very ground of being and existence—an indivisible Unity which can never be added to nor subtracted from.  He is the Almighty, All Knowing, All Present One, from whom all things have their origin and to whom all things shall return.  He is One, and there is no other besides Him, nor does He countenance the delusions of rivals.  And yet, He is revealed as a perfect community of Three:  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, unconfused and unmixed in their Persons, yet undivided in their divine essence.  Jesus was not just a Prophet, but the very Word of God made Flesh, the eternally begotten Son of the Father, full of grace and truth.  He was beheld by His Apostles, and accomplished what only God incarnate could do by giving His life as a ransom for the world.  His testimony in the world has continued by the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and sent by the Son, convicting the world of sin and righteousness and truth.  The Word of God proclaimed has its divine power by the Holy Spirit, preached in full as both Law and Gospel, and remaining as the Light of God’s saving Love in the world.  Thus we worship the only True God:  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God now and forever, and unto ages of ages without end.

 

The world will have its darkness and deceptions until the Last Day, but the reality of God’s Eternal Word will continue to shine long after this world has faded away.  That Light and Love of God for the salvation of the world, by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone, will resound in the vaults of heaven and the hearts of men for all time, because our saving God, the Most Holy Trinity, has made it so.  Hear the Light and Love of God come to you this day, calling you out of your slavery to evil under the suffocating cloak of darkness, that you might rise into the liberating Life of His Word and Will forever.  Soli Deo Gloria!  Amen.

 

Thy Word is Truth: A Meditation on John 17 for the 7th Sunday in Easter

Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me,

 that they may be one, as we are.

While I was with them in the world, I kept them in thy name:

 those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost,

but the son of perdition; that the scripture might be fulfilled.

And now come I to thee; and these things I speak in the world,

that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves.

I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them,

because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.

I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world,

but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil.

They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.

Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.

 

John’s 17^th chapter of his Gospel is a remembrance of what some call Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer:  a solemn proclamation and intercession of our Savior to His Father before His final journey to Calvary, where He would accomplish the Vicarious Atonement for the sins of the world through His death on the His Cross.  Of significant note in this prayer is the plea that His people would be one, just as He and the Father are One, which would be accomplished in and through His Word.  Just as the Father sent the Incarnate Word into the world, so Jesus would send His disciples into the world with His Word, so that all who would believe in Him and His Word would be sanctified by that Word of Truth.  The unity of Christians is made through that Word, bringing together the whole household of faith in this world and the next, with the Eternal Word of the Father, in the power of the Holy Spirit—that same Word which the Lord says will never return to Him void of the purpose for which it is sent, and will abide forever even as the world and all that is in it, fades away.

 

Much has been made over the centuries about attempts at Christian unity, with appeals from many quarters for submission to one or another ecclesiastical structure.  Many denominations, traditions, and rites of Christians, some more ancient and others more modern, claim to have the totality of Truth abiding in them, and therefore demand fealty and submission from all other erring Christians.  This way of thinking leads to competition between Christian fellowships, usually with some collection of ecclesiastical bureaucrats hoping to run the largest organization, together with all its collected revenues and resources.  But at least two questions are begged by such an approach, particularly in light of Jesus’ teaching on Christian unity:  first, when did Jesus command His disciples to go and make themselves one?  And second, was Jesus’ prayer to the Father not answered in the affirmative?  Or posited another way, did Jesus fail to accomplish the unity of His people by His own work and Word, therefore leaving this plaintive work for His disciples to accomplish in His stead, since His Father had denied His Son that which He prayed for before His brutal march to Golgotha?

 

When considered through the lens of John 17, bureaucratic attempts at creating Christian unity through human works and ambition are as laughable as they are blasphemous.  There is nothing that Jesus, the Only Begotten Son of the Father, full of grace and truth, fully human and fully divine, has not received from the Father and shared with the Holy Spirit.  There is no division in the Most Holy Trinity, as God can neither be divided in His essential unity nor confused in His divine Persons.  When the Eternal Word of God prayed that His people would be One by His Word, He created what He commanded:  the community of faith in His Word, is and always will be, His Church.  That Church must be by definition One, because it is united by faith in the Word of God alone, in which grace is poured out unto eternal life for everyone who repents and believes the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  And if everyone who is united to Jesus is so by faith in His Word, and then united to each other through Jesus who saves each one by grace through faith, then that united fellowship of believers must also be Holy as they are sanctified in that Word of Truth.  Further, that saving, uniting, and sanctifying Word must also be Universal to all mankind, and thus such a fellowship is also necessarily Catholic—bound together across all human divisions of culture, language, rite, ritual, and custom, just as it is bound together across all time, geography, and space.  Likewise, as that Word is given by Jesus to His disciples to be declared by His Prophets and Apostles, the fellowship created by His Word must also be Apostolic—known, confessed, and transmitted from one generation to the next in the writings of the Holy Scriptures, penned by those same Prophets and Apostles.

 

As the Creed declares, we believe in One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church that no one other than Jesus established and maintains by His Word.  We do not confess a church which is an idol of our own making, as if fallen human hands can accomplish what the Lord God Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, alone brings into existence.  The Christian does not create unity between himself and God anymore than he creates unity between himself and his brother—rather the Word of God creates in the Christian faith to believe unto salvation, binding the individual to the Triune God by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone, and then through Himself by His Word, binds the individual Christian to all other Christians, creating one people and household of faith.  In our fallen nature, our human works often result in the division of people, with one group in power seeking to subjugate and enslave another so that the strong might satisfy their passions through domination of the weak—but this is not God’s way nor His design.  He has not left so crucial a task as Christian unity in the hands of people who could save neither themselves nor their world, but rather created for His people the unity they could not build for themselves by the virtue and power of His Eternal Word.

 

Take comfort, dear Christian, that your unity with God the Father is accomplished by the Son, sealed with the Holy Spirit through the Word of Truth which He has spoken to you.  You are united with God by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone, His Word and Spirit working in you the faith to receive His grace, and accomplishing your sanctification so that you might be brought into His Kingdom which knows no end.  So, too, is every Christian, and thus every Christian is united to each other by the same saving grace, the same Savior, and the same Word.  The Church does not create her unity, but confesses, declares, and celebrates it as the work of Her Redeemer King—and so sing all the people of God together, to His glory alone, world without end.  Amen.