Jesus the Life-Giver--May 13, 2024

Jesus the Life-Giver--May 13, 2024

"After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, 'Father, the house 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'." [John 17:1-2]

It's that old line of Robert Farrar Capon again:  "Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to teach the teachable; He did not come to improve the improvable; He did not come to reform the reformable. None of those things works."  Or, to put it more succinctly, Jesus' mission was to bring people to life.  The kind of life Jesus gives is not a matter of just getting by or eking out a miserable span of years, but of abundant life... extraordinary life... infinite life.  It is about thriving, not merely surviving.  And when you ask John the gospel-writer, narrating for us the words from the prayer Jesus offered on the night of his arrest, he'll say that has been Jesus' mission from the get-go: to give the kind of life that is eternal far and wide to all his people.

And notice, too, that as John tells it, Jesus is in the business of directly giving life itself--his own life--not simply offering clues or hints or step-by-step instructions for how we can get life ourselves.  That difference is huge, because honestly, a lot of the time Respectable Religious Folks talk about Jesus like he's big on giving out directions for how we can get ourselves into the realm of eternal life (like he's selling maps to the houses of celebrities in LA or something), but then he leaves it up to us to follow the steps and get there ourselves.  And that makes it sound like "eternal life" is just about "going to heaven after you die" rather than something Jesus gives now.  But the life Jesus gives isn't just a distant destination for which Jesus can only give you a map. He brings us to life even now, right here and right where we are, as well as beyond the grip of death.  Jesus is Life-Giver par excellence.

This makes Jesus more like a mother and less like a self-help book.  To be sure, there are plenty of religious teachers who will happily sell us their self-help books offering their "take" on how to live a good life, maybe even a joyful and vibrant life.  They may give us rules for our behavior, directions about food or rest, principles for our relationships, or even their own recipes for life after death.  And maybe you will find a teacher like that whose instructions seem helpful, and you might commit your life to following their blueprints.  But that still boils down to you doing the work following someone else's plans.  

When we talk about Jesus giving us life, it is more like the way a mother gives life--the thing itself, the gift of breath and existence and vitality, beyond our earning but simply as a gift of grace.  In fact, the great medieval mystic and theologian Julian of Norwich said that this is exactly how Jesus gives us life--like our mothers.  She writes:  "It is a characteristic of God to overcome evil with good. Jesus Christ therefore, who himself overcame evil with good, is our true Mother. We received our ‘Being’ from Him, ­and this is where His Maternity starts. ­And with it comes the gentle Protection and Guard of Love which will never ceases to surround us. Just as God is our Father, so God is also our Mother."  In other words, when we say that Jesus is the giver of life to us, we mean it more in the sense that our mothers brought us into being than in the sense that Jesus taught us some life-saving lessons which we applied and put into practice on our own.  Jesus doesn't just give us an instruction manual for how to get to heaven after we die; he gives us his very own life to bring us to life like our mothers did.

The invitation in front of us today is to let Jesus' life be lived through us--to take the life Jesus has given us and to step into it, to enact it, to let it take shape within our choices, words, and actions.  And I suspect then we'll discover that "eternal life" isn't just a quantity, but a quality, of life.  It's not just a lot of years we'll be given after we die, but that we will live more truly and deeply now.  We'll find our lives made richer with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, and courage.  We'll find our hearts less heavy with fear, with jealousy, with malice, and with hatred.  We'll find a new appreciation and gratitude for all things as we come to see each breath and each piece of creation as gifts of a gracious God.  All of that is to say, we'll be more alive, even now.

This is what we celebrate in the news of the resurrection: not just a map for how to get to heaven one day if only we'll follow the directions well enough, but Jesus' own live given to us like a mother birthing her child into existence.  This is the gift of Jesus' life in our own.

Lord Jesus, enliven us with your own presence, in all the ways you choose.