| Onward into James Alison's look at resurrection and original sin. The New Testament is concerned in the first place with an announcement about God. This is made absolutely clear in 1 John 1:5: "This is the message we (ie., "John" representing the apostolic witness) have heard from him (ie., Jesus) and proclaim to you (ie., the Church, actual or yet to be), that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all." The resurrection was not a miraculous event within a preexisting framework of understanding of God, but the event by which God recast the possibility of human understanding of God. For this to happen God simultaneously made use of and blew apart the understanding of God that had developed over the centuries among the Jewish people. God did this in the person of Jesus, through his life and teaching, leading up to and including his death. As we so often say, we know about our God when we look to the life of Jesus. So as we ask what is the love of God - we look to Jesus wide-open attention to any and all people. We see how life is redefined as though it is something beyond us and yet - it is exactly us. No longer is God to be distant and a question for us to figure out. Now, we look to Jesus. Even when Jesus doesn't 'teach' about this or that, we can look at his life and consider what is revealed about our God for our times through what God in the flesh - back then - did in the faithful storytelling we have inherited and the power that comes within the retelling of this God-with-us fabric of hope and love. From the 1 John passage quoted above, I thought of the fact that within our storytelling - even though we know of darkness and light - we are handed a light that transforms darkness. In some way, the divide between darkness and light is no longer a reality that shapes us. We are shaped by a living light. Connection: It is not always easy to remember how our God does change all things through the person of Jesus. The change is that we are now able to see the power of God as it become something as common as the flesh we all share. Lord of the Resurrection, come among us again from day to day that we will take on the character of life that burst open into the day at hand through the resurrection. Amen. |
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