The Gift IS God

The Gift IS God--May 28, 2019

"And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we may know him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life." [1 John 5:20]

Church folk talk about "eternal life" a whole lot... but maybe we've been burying the lede all this time.  A lot of the Respectable Religious people I know talk about "eternal life" as a unit of time (as in, a lifespan that goes on and on and on), when the Scriptures themselves emphasize that really, it's Christ himself.  "Eternal life" isn't primarily about "how long" but rather about "who" gives himself to us.

I know, I know--that also includes life that lasts forever, life beyond the grip of death, life that reunites us with the people of God who have never fallen out of God's grip for a second.  I know that the Christian hope includes a resurrection life that goes on without end.  But that's not separable from the "Who" piece--the God who gives us that life.  In the end, the gift God gives is... God's own self, God's own life.  It just so happens to be a gift that plays out over eternity to be fully received.

Here in this passage, a writer name John pushes us to hear that eternal life is not a thing you can separate from the person of God—in fact eternal life is a who. We belong, John says, to Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, who “is the true God and eternal life.”

Did you catch that?  The God we meet in Christ IS "eternal life," not simply that he "has it" or "can make it available to you if the price is right." But it is God's very own Being.  That means “eternal life” is not some object God can lob down at us, not just a present in a box that we can open apart from God himself. What God really offers us is not merely immortality or a new lifestyle, but in the end, what God offers us is...God. What Christ gives us is... Christ himself. He gives us a life that participates in none other than God himself, and that by its very nature goes on without end. It means that God is the goal of our existence, and that God has been working through human history to draw us, not just to a time called “eternity” or to a post-mortem street address called “heaven,” but to the living Christ himself, so that we can share God’s own life.

This might sound very strange and mystical, but maybe it’s not that different from the promises we make to each other in marriage. When a couple says to one another, “I promise to be faithful to you until death parts us,” they are primarily promising themselves to each other, and only secondarily making promises about a length of time. There are no guarantees in this life (only bonuses, as the poet says), and we cannot be assured of a length of years we will get to be with those to whom we make promises. “Until death parts us” could be fifty or sixty years, or it could be a week. To exchange vows in marriage is not so much about a quantity of time, or to guarantee that you'll be available for periodic date nights for social occasions, but about giving yourself to the beloved for as long as you have time to give. And really, the vows of marriage are not really about a particular kind of life, either—traditionally, we point out in the vows that the shared life in front of the couple could take all kinds of dips and turns. “For richer or poorer, in sickness and in heath, for better or worse,” we say. Again, the point is not that we promise our spouses a certain length of time (at least not exactly), and not even a certain course of life—all we really can promise is our abiding presence, for however that affects the when and the what. All we can really promise is the who. All we can really give is ourselves.

Now, of course, when we make these kinds of promises in marriage, sometimes things fall apart. We have the best of intentions when we give ourselves to our spouses and promise ourselves to one another “until death parts us,” but we humans are nevertheless a bunch of wounded, moping, ragged sinners (and sometimes jerks and scoundrels to boot). And sometimes our promises simply cannot hold. We are not terribly good promise keepers, sad as it is to say. But at least the analogy is there to what God offers us. Whereas our promises give out, God’s do not—but the content of the promises is very much the same. Christ promises us himself. God offers to let us share the divine life, to indwell us and to animate us, to shape us and hold us, until we become perfect reflections of the character of Christ, reflecting God’s light back to each other and to God. 

Essentially what God promises is us “I give you myself for as long as I am around”—it’s just that with the living God, we are talking about Someone whose life will not end and who will be around forever. That is why we can talk about having eternal life forever and ever in God’s presence beyond death. What God gives us, ultimately, is God's own self. “Eternal life” is not a separate product that God has lying around on the shelf in the back store rooms of heaven—it is life because God is Life and the Source of our life, and it is eternal because God lives forever, indeed beyond and outside of time altogether.

All of a sudden, the promises of the Christian faith seem a lot deeper. We are offered so much more than we sometimes tell people. We settle, in our religious programming and literature, for telling people about “life in a heavenly mansion after you die” or “the 8 easy steps for a happy and content family life,” when what God has really been offering us is nothing less than God’s very own self. Like the doe-eyed couple taking their vows, God promises to give us nothing less than himself. Wow. That is worth telling others about. That is worth sharing with everybody.

Today, we close with a prayer that was first offered by the wise and faithful saint, Julian of Norwich, who seems to have heard just what John was saying in this passages, and who was determined to take God up on the offer:

God, of your goodness give me yourself for you are sufficient for me. I cannot properly ask anything less, to be worthy of you. If I were to ask less, I should always be in want. In you alone do I have all.