A Thought For The Week Of September 26, 2016

"The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us." (1 John 1:2) The opening verses of John's Gospel are to me some of the most meaningful verses to be found in the Bible. We're less familiar with the Letters of John than with the Gospel of John, and that's unfortunate, because the first few verses of 1 John are also rich in meaning for us. In Jesus is life. The two are inseparable. That's a basic witness of Christian faith, and it's one of the foundational messages of the New Testament that's spoken of in great detail at the start of 1 John: in Jesus there is life that is available to all. The opening of 1 John doesn't go into great detail about the life Jesus gives. Rather, it's a form of testimony: "we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us." These words are essentially making the same claims for Jesus that are made in the opening of John's Gospel - that Jesus (the Christ, the Word, the Son) has always existed, and that all things have come through him. The eternal nature of Jesus is what we claim as his followers - we have fellowship not only with each other, this tells us, but also with the Father and with the Son. And if God is eternal, then by being in fellowship with God we gain that eternal life for ourselves. It seems to me that what John is saying is that our "fellowship" with God imparts to us that most basic characteristic - God's eternal nature becomes our eternal nature. Jesus spoke a lot about "life" during his ministry. He said "I am the life." He promised abundant life to all who followed him. Life that never ends. This is Jesus' promise to us, and our relationship or fellowship with God through him is our source of eternal life. It remains for us to speak about this life that we have encountered and claimed, just as John speaks about it to us. This verse reminds us to testify to and proclaim what we know to be true, and one of the most basic things we know is that in Jesus there is abundant and eternal life.