By: The Rev. Libbie Weber
Look at that collect! It sets the tone for Life visibly and audibly right at the beginning of the service this week. In God’s graciousness He sends His blessed Son Jesus Christ from heaven to earth to be the true bread that gives us and the whole creation life. Tie that to the Gospel reading from John, that passage and verse so well-known and well-loved, set in the midst of Nicodemus’s visit to Jesus at night. It’s surely one of the antecedents for this collect along with John’s stunning elaboration of it in chapter 6, and we have the very essence of the Good News: ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life’. As Origen wrote so beautifully, ‘Before the sojourn of Christ [i.e., his life here on earth], the Law and the Prophets did not contain the proclamation which belongs to the definition of the Gospel, since he who explained the mysteries in them had not yet come. But since the Savior has come and has caused the Gospel to be embodied [i.e., a living human being who is at the same time God], he has by the Gospel made all things as Gospel’.
The Law and the Prophets pointed the way to a Savior, but readers and hearers could not look forward with specificity to whom that might be. Jesus’ Gospel-ness — which I dare say in trying to exegete Origen–is his very Life and the Life of the Trinity to which he points, and true Life itself — reveals all words in Holy Scripture to be bearers of that Life. How better to say it? All of history points to this defining moment, and the definition IS the gift of Life. Mind- and heart-blowing!
The word ‘blessed’ in the collect may catch our eyes. One of the best explanations of ‘blessing’ I have ever come across is from the late Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann in his book For the Life of the World. It would be worth it to read the whole passage in his first chapter’s section two, in light of our collect and readings this week, but here is a glorious preview: ‘All that exists is God’s gift to man, and it all exists to make God known to man, to make man’s life communion with God. It is divine love made food, made life for man. God blesses [his emphasis] everything he creates, and, in biblical language, this means that He makes all creation the sign and means of His presence and wisdom, love and revelation: “O taste and see that the Lord is good”‘. God’s Son is begotten not made; He creates with God; but He is at the heart of God’s blessing in creation in that His presence on earth, His wisdom, love and and revelation are Life. In Him we know and love and experience the truest Life.
There is so much to consider in Schmemann’s words when read together with John 3 and John 6. Our Blessed Jesus is the Bread of Life and Love. God’s very Life, His relationship of Love among the persons of the Trinity, and His gifts of Life and Love to us show us that in our creation and re-creation real Life and real Love are the same thing and they are the intimate stuff of the universe. Considering the above, we will have new, deep, and richly formative insights into Ephesians 2.1-10 – here vv. 4-7: ‘God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ–by grace you have been saved–and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus’.