A sermon for
Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
7th July
2024
Genesis 22.1-13
1 John 1.1 – 2.2
1 John 1.1 – 2.2
This week
is the first sermon in our summer series
looking at the first epistle of John, or ‘1 John’ as it’s often known.
You can find it hiding towards the back of the New Testament,
along with 2 and 3 John, just before the Book of Revelation.
Though often described as a letter,
1 John is, in many ways, better understood as a sermon,
written to encourage and teach a group of Jesus’ followers
who find their community in danger of fracturing.
It’s actually an anonymous text,
but by the end of the second century it became identified
as having been written by someone called ‘John’;
and over the next hundred and fifty years or so,
people came to assume that this was the same person
who wrote the other two shorter letters that follow it,
and the Fourth Gospel (another anonymous text),
and the Book of Revelation.
They also assume that this ‘John’ who may, or may not,
have written all of these documents,
was the same ‘John’ the apostle,
who we meet in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke,
the brother of James and the son of Zebedee.
This association with one of the apostles,
even if it was only based on assumptions and sharing a common name
was helpful in these documents becoming accepted as holy scripture,
when other texts were falling by the wayside.
But the reality, I’m afraid, is probably much less romantic.
Most scholars accept that it is very unlikely
that an Aramaic-speaking fisherman from Galilee
could have written the Classical Greek of the Fourth Gospel,
and that it’s unlikely that the gospel, the letters, and the apocalypse,
even share a common author.
But they do all share some common themes,
such as light, life, and truth; mystery and revelation.
So there is some connection between these documents,
between them they make up what is probably best described
as a ‘Johannine tradition’.
These texts associated with the name ‘John’
were probably written over a period of about 40 years,
and the people who wrote the later ones
knew and were inspired by the earlier ones.
For what it’s worth, my best guess is that the Book of Revelation is the earliest,
written in the early 70s, so about 15-20 years after Paul’s letters,
and contemporary with Matthew’s gospel.
Then the Fourth Gospel was written somewhere around the year 90,
as a version of the Jesus story told by a community
whose theology had been shaped by their knowledge of the Book of Revelation.
And then the letters were written somewhere around the turn of the century,
by someone who knew, not only the Book of Revelation,
but also the Fourth Gospel.
Readers and hearers encountering the first letter of John for the first time
may do so with a sense of déjà vu.
Numerous phrases from the Gospel of John occur in the letter,
though often with slightly different wording.
In addition, those familiar with mid-twentieth century liturgical worship
will also hear echoes of the confession and communion liturgies.
So now, let’s turn to the first letter,
and then over the next few weeks as we journey through the rest of it,
we’ll see if we can hear this ancient text speaking to us.
In The Sound of Music, when Julie Andrews teaches the children to sing,
she says to them:
Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.
And similarly in Wonderland, the King advises the White Rabbit,
that the beginning is always a good place to begin.
Well, it’s as if the author of the first letter of John
has been heeding their advice,
because this letter begins at the very beginning.
‘We declare to you what was from the beginning,
what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes,
what we have looked at and touched with our hands,
concerning the word of life.
This life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it,
and declare to you the eternal life
that was with the father and was revealed to us.’
In other words, the letter starts
with the revelation of God in the person of Jesus.
And in true Johannine style, a sort of code-word is used for Jesus:
in language reminiscent of the prologue to John’s gospel,
Jesus is referred to as ‘the word’,
or the ‘logos’, as it is put in the original Greek.
But whereas in the Gospel,
the ‘logos’ is presented as the pre-existent word of creation,
the ‘word’ that was ‘in the beginning’,
in the first letter of John
Jesus is presented as the ‘word of life’.
For the author of this letter, Jesus is first and foremost a revelation of ‘life’,
and this ‘life’, it seems, has an eternal quality to it:
life originating with the Father,
life revealed to humans in and through the life of Jesus.
Or, to put it another way,
life in all its fullness can be found and experienced
through an encounter with the life of Jesus.
And this new life that has come us,
and which has caused us to be ‘born again’,
(to use another of the Gospel’s phrases),
has been made known to us through our encounter
with the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus,
whose life speaks words of life to us.
This is the gospel that is ours to inhabit and to share,
it is the good news that God has been made known to all people
in and through the life of Jesus.
And here we come to one of the key questions,
that today’s passage raises for us.
And the question is this:
‘What God will we believe in?’
‘What God will you believe in?’
The thing is, there are, as there always have been, plenty of options.
Which God you believe in and worship is not a foregone conclusion!
In the ancient world of the first century,
the original context for the first letter of John,
the decision as to which God you would worship,
was a very real choice.
Many of the early recipients of this letter would have been Jewish people,
worshipping faithfully the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
And in fact, the author of the letter, whoever he was,
was himself a Jew, who had come to worship Jesus as the messiah.
But some of the other recipients of his letter
would have been what became known as pagans,
those who had grown up worshipping the gods
of the Greek and Roman pantheons,
and possibly also worshipping the emperor as another divine being.
You see, there were numerous competing gods
available for you to worship in the first century;
and these different gods were encountered in a variety of different ways.
The God of the Jews was known through the stories of the Jewish faith,
preserved in the words of the Hebrew Bible,
through the worship practices of the synagogues,
and in the cultic practices of the Temple in Jerusalem
until its destruction in the year 70,
just a few decades before this letter was written.
While the gods of the Greeks and the Romans were known
through their stories, idols, images, and temples,
and the worship of them formed the backbone to the structure of society:
to decline to worship these gods
was an act of rebellion, of civil disobedience.
The Jews had negotiated a kind of uneasy truce,
by which they had some protection under the Roman law
to allow them to worship their God,
but there were strict regulations
preventing them from seeking to convert others to their faith,
and they were often an easy target for scapegoating within the ancient world.
The long and terrible history of European antisemitism
has its origins in the way the Roman empire
treated and mistreated its Jewish citizens.
And into all of this, early Christians like the author of our letter for this morning,
were trying to say something new.
They claimed that if you want to know God,
you don’t look primarily to the Jewish scriptures,
or to the worship practices of the synagogues;
or to the idols, images, and stories of the pagan pantheon;
or even to the emperor in Rome himself.
Rather, you look to the life of Jesus.
And what you discover if you do this, says our letter, is a new vision of God,
a new understanding of who God is and how God can be known.
Verse 5: ‘This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you,
that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all’.
After this point in the letter, the word ‘life’ drops out of use for a bit,
and is replaced with the word ‘light’, another typically Johannine concept.
The word that has been heard, seen, and encountered is the word of life,
but what comes into the world through that word of life
is a vision of a God who is pure light.
‘God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all’.
This kind of understanding of God
stood in stark contrast with the competing visions of the ancient gods
that would have been familiar to the early recipients of this letter.
The ancient pagans believed that some gods were angry, and some were capricious,
some were gluttonous, and some were lustful,
some were unfaithful, and some were violent.
To say that the gods had ‘no darkness’
would have been as nonsensical to many of those receiving this letter,
as would saying that humans had ‘no darkness’ in them.
And this is because the ancient gods had come into being to reflect human nature;
they took all our glories and all of our failures,
all of our light and all of our darkness,
and wrote them across the heavens.
The reason there were so many gods
was because humans are so complicated.
Indeed, the Jewish understanding of one God
had emerged against a similar context of many gods;
not the Roman or Greek gods of the first century,
but the multiple tribal gods of the Ancient Near East a millennia or more before.
And the Jewish belief that God is one, rather than many,
was a radical departure from the beliefs of the nations surrounding them.
One way of reading the Old Testament is to see it as a testimony
to the Jewish attempt to understand their conviction that God is one.
The different stories of the Hebrew Scriptures
are a series of thought experiments concerning the nature of God,
as they explore different ways of articulating their unique perspective on faith.
Is the ‘one God’ of the Jews a consistent, faithful God, or is he capricious and needy?
Is God a God of war, or of peace?
Does God demand sacrifice, or offer mercy?
The story we heard earlier from Genesis,
of God testing Abraham by asking him to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice,
is just such an example
of ancient Jewish exploration into the nature of their God.
The question being asked here was whether God is the kind of God
who demands a sacrifice from his most faithful follower?
At the beginning of the story, in an echo of the story of Job,
God decides to test the faithfulness of Abraham
by asking something of him that is surely too costly.
But nontheless Abraham and Isaac set off up the hill,
with Isaac carrying his cross, so to speak, on his shoulders.
It’s only at the last moment,
once Abraham has proved himself willing to sacrifice his own dearly beloved son,
that an angel directs him to an alternative sacrifice,
and the ram caught in the thicket is offered in place of the boy.
The temptations to allegorise this story onto the crucifixion of Jesus are strong,
resonating as it does with the gospel stories
of Jesus carrying his own cross to Golgotha,
and dying as a substitute for sinful humans.
But whilst this story of Abraham and Isaac
was clearly in the minds of the gospel writers
as they reflected on the nature of the Easter story,
there is no straightforward allegory to be found here.
Because at the heart of the Abraham and Isaac story
is still a God who demands a sacrifice.
It might not be Isaac in the end,
but the ram still has to die in Isaac’s place
in order that he might live.
And if we simply substitute Jesus for the ram caught in the thicket,
and take this as our understanding of what happens on the cross,
we still end up with a God who demands a sacrifice unto death.
And a God who demands death to satisfy his wrath at human sin
doesn’t sound much like a God who is light,
and in whom there is no darkness at all.
This would be a God of anger, vengeance, and violence,
not a God of life, love, and reconciliation.
The conviction that God is life and light,
articulated so clearly in the first letter of John,
challenges us to reconsider our theology of the cross.
If our view of the cross is dominated by death
and darkness,
something profound has gone astray.
If the cross is about God demanding a blood
sacrifice
getting what he requires from an innocent victim,
then we have a view of God which is predicated on death and darkness.
Saying that God substitutes Jesus for us,
in the same way that Abraham substituted the ram for Isaac,
does not solve this problem.
What we need is another way of seeing the cross,
and the story of Jesus gives us exactly this.
The revelation of God in Jesus
is a radical departure from all other views of God
that are predicated on transactional substitutionary atonement.
If the story ended at the cross,
we would be left with a violent God, killing his innocent son,
to satisfy some universal law that sin must be paid for by death.
But the resurrection gives the lie to this
theology.
The empty tomb challenges all understandings of God
which are predicated on darkness and violence.
The events of Easter Sunday tell us that God is about life, not death.
Death is a human thing, not a divine thing.
As frail mortal beings, we live our lives in the shadow of death.
We can postpone it, we can fear it,
we can deny it, but we cannot avoid it.
But God is not about death, God is about life.
And this means that God is not about violence.
When we find ourselves worshipping a God of violence,
I would suggest that we have invented God, once again, in our own image.
If we believe that God demands a sacrifice,
and then offers his son to be that sacrifice,
we are making our thing to be God’s thing,
and that is surely a grave error.
You see, the truth is that violence, suffering, and death
are our experience, not God’s.
Murder is a human action, not a divine one.
Jealously, envy, wrath and rage are human, not godly, emotions.
And the message of the cross is not that God has become like us,
demanding of us a blood sacrifice to atone for our sins.
But rather, the message of the cross is that God has become one of us,
entering into our darkness of suffering and death
to bring light and life, forgiveness and reconciliation.
The cross is God’s sacrifice offered to us,
not the other way around.
The death of Jesus at the hands of sinners
unmasks the depths of human depravity;
it shines the fierce light of God
into the darkest corner of the human psyche;
it reveals the murderous intent that lies deep in each human soul,
and meets that desire for death with an overwhelming gift of life.
The worst thing one human can do to another
is taken by Jesus into his own body on the cross,
and still it is not enough to extinguish the life
that breaks through the darkness of death,
to leave the tomb empty and the darkness defeated.
And so we are called to reassess our view of God,
to lay aside our conceptions of God as angry, violent, and vengeful.
We need to learn the difficult lesson that darkness lies not within the heart of God,
but within our own hearts.
As the author of 1 John puts it,
‘If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves,
and the truth is not in us.’ (v.8)
But…
‘If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins
and cleanse us from all unrighteousness’ (v.9)
This is the good news of God’s love, revealed in the life of Jesus,
it is a story of life and light,
of forgiveness and reconciliation,
of peace and overwhelming love.
The cross is the ultimate demonstration of God’s commitment to life;
to my life, to your life, to our life together.
The challenge for us, as we gather in the presence of God,
is to learn what it is to be born again into the love of God,
to set aside our addictions to violence,
our compulsions to revenge,
and our captivity to malice, guile,
insincerity, envy, and slander. (1 Pet. 2.1)
And let us not deceive ourselves
that these are not part of us,
because darkness lies in all our hearts.
And let us not deceive ourselves
that these are part of God’s nature,
because God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.
Rather, let us find in the story of Christ,
a new way of meeting God,
who comes to us with the gift of light and life,
bringing a new way of seeing ourselves,
where finally we see ourselves as God sees us.
looking at the first epistle of John, or ‘1 John’ as it’s often known.
You can find it hiding towards the back of the New Testament,
along with 2 and 3 John, just before the Book of Revelation.
Though often described as a letter,
1 John is, in many ways, better understood as a sermon,
written to encourage and teach a group of Jesus’ followers
who find their community in danger of fracturing.
It’s actually an anonymous text,
but by the end of the second century it became identified
as having been written by someone called ‘John’;
and over the next hundred and fifty years or so,
people came to assume that this was the same person
who wrote the other two shorter letters that follow it,
and the Fourth Gospel (another anonymous text),
and the Book of Revelation.
They also assume that this ‘John’ who may, or may not,
have written all of these documents,
was the same ‘John’ the apostle,
who we meet in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke,
the brother of James and the son of Zebedee.
This association with one of the apostles,
even if it was only based on assumptions and sharing a common name
was helpful in these documents becoming accepted as holy scripture,
when other texts were falling by the wayside.
But the reality, I’m afraid, is probably much less romantic.
Most scholars accept that it is very unlikely
that an Aramaic-speaking fisherman from Galilee
could have written the Classical Greek of the Fourth Gospel,
and that it’s unlikely that the gospel, the letters, and the apocalypse,
even share a common author.
But they do all share some common themes,
such as light, life, and truth; mystery and revelation.
So there is some connection between these documents,
between them they make up what is probably best described
as a ‘Johannine tradition’.
These texts associated with the name ‘John’
were probably written over a period of about 40 years,
and the people who wrote the later ones
knew and were inspired by the earlier ones.
For what it’s worth, my best guess is that the Book of Revelation is the earliest,
written in the early 70s, so about 15-20 years after Paul’s letters,
and contemporary with Matthew’s gospel.
Then the Fourth Gospel was written somewhere around the year 90,
as a version of the Jesus story told by a community
whose theology had been shaped by their knowledge of the Book of Revelation.
And then the letters were written somewhere around the turn of the century,
by someone who knew, not only the Book of Revelation,
but also the Fourth Gospel.
Readers and hearers encountering the first letter of John for the first time
may do so with a sense of déjà vu.
Numerous phrases from the Gospel of John occur in the letter,
though often with slightly different wording.
In addition, those familiar with mid-twentieth century liturgical worship
will also hear echoes of the confession and communion liturgies.
So now, let’s turn to the first letter,
and then over the next few weeks as we journey through the rest of it,
we’ll see if we can hear this ancient text speaking to us.
In The Sound of Music, when Julie Andrews teaches the children to sing,
she says to them:
Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.
And similarly in Wonderland, the King advises the White Rabbit,
that the beginning is always a good place to begin.
Well, it’s as if the author of the first letter of John
has been heeding their advice,
because this letter begins at the very beginning.
‘We declare to you what was from the beginning,
what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes,
what we have looked at and touched with our hands,
concerning the word of life.
This life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it,
and declare to you the eternal life
that was with the father and was revealed to us.’
In other words, the letter starts
with the revelation of God in the person of Jesus.
And in true Johannine style, a sort of code-word is used for Jesus:
in language reminiscent of the prologue to John’s gospel,
Jesus is referred to as ‘the word’,
or the ‘logos’, as it is put in the original Greek.
But whereas in the Gospel,
the ‘logos’ is presented as the pre-existent word of creation,
the ‘word’ that was ‘in the beginning’,
in the first letter of John
Jesus is presented as the ‘word of life’.
For the author of this letter, Jesus is first and foremost a revelation of ‘life’,
and this ‘life’, it seems, has an eternal quality to it:
life originating with the Father,
life revealed to humans in and through the life of Jesus.
Or, to put it another way,
life in all its fullness can be found and experienced
through an encounter with the life of Jesus.
And this new life that has come us,
and which has caused us to be ‘born again’,
(to use another of the Gospel’s phrases),
has been made known to us through our encounter
with the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus,
whose life speaks words of life to us.
This is the gospel that is ours to inhabit and to share,
it is the good news that God has been made known to all people
in and through the life of Jesus.
And here we come to one of the key questions,
that today’s passage raises for us.
And the question is this:
‘What God will we believe in?’
‘What God will you believe in?’
The thing is, there are, as there always have been, plenty of options.
Which God you believe in and worship is not a foregone conclusion!
In the ancient world of the first century,
the original context for the first letter of John,
the decision as to which God you would worship,
was a very real choice.
Many of the early recipients of this letter would have been Jewish people,
worshipping faithfully the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
And in fact, the author of the letter, whoever he was,
was himself a Jew, who had come to worship Jesus as the messiah.
But some of the other recipients of his letter
would have been what became known as pagans,
those who had grown up worshipping the gods
of the Greek and Roman pantheons,
and possibly also worshipping the emperor as another divine being.
You see, there were numerous competing gods
available for you to worship in the first century;
and these different gods were encountered in a variety of different ways.
The God of the Jews was known through the stories of the Jewish faith,
preserved in the words of the Hebrew Bible,
through the worship practices of the synagogues,
and in the cultic practices of the Temple in Jerusalem
until its destruction in the year 70,
just a few decades before this letter was written.
While the gods of the Greeks and the Romans were known
through their stories, idols, images, and temples,
and the worship of them formed the backbone to the structure of society:
to decline to worship these gods
was an act of rebellion, of civil disobedience.
The Jews had negotiated a kind of uneasy truce,
by which they had some protection under the Roman law
to allow them to worship their God,
but there were strict regulations
preventing them from seeking to convert others to their faith,
and they were often an easy target for scapegoating within the ancient world.
The long and terrible history of European antisemitism
has its origins in the way the Roman empire
treated and mistreated its Jewish citizens.
And into all of this, early Christians like the author of our letter for this morning,
were trying to say something new.
They claimed that if you want to know God,
you don’t look primarily to the Jewish scriptures,
or to the worship practices of the synagogues;
or to the idols, images, and stories of the pagan pantheon;
or even to the emperor in Rome himself.
Rather, you look to the life of Jesus.
And what you discover if you do this, says our letter, is a new vision of God,
a new understanding of who God is and how God can be known.
Verse 5: ‘This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you,
that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all’.
After this point in the letter, the word ‘life’ drops out of use for a bit,
and is replaced with the word ‘light’, another typically Johannine concept.
The word that has been heard, seen, and encountered is the word of life,
but what comes into the world through that word of life
is a vision of a God who is pure light.
‘God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all’.
This kind of understanding of God
stood in stark contrast with the competing visions of the ancient gods
that would have been familiar to the early recipients of this letter.
The ancient pagans believed that some gods were angry, and some were capricious,
some were gluttonous, and some were lustful,
some were unfaithful, and some were violent.
To say that the gods had ‘no darkness’
would have been as nonsensical to many of those receiving this letter,
as would saying that humans had ‘no darkness’ in them.
And this is because the ancient gods had come into being to reflect human nature;
they took all our glories and all of our failures,
all of our light and all of our darkness,
and wrote them across the heavens.
The reason there were so many gods
was because humans are so complicated.
Indeed, the Jewish understanding of one God
had emerged against a similar context of many gods;
not the Roman or Greek gods of the first century,
but the multiple tribal gods of the Ancient Near East a millennia or more before.
And the Jewish belief that God is one, rather than many,
was a radical departure from the beliefs of the nations surrounding them.
One way of reading the Old Testament is to see it as a testimony
to the Jewish attempt to understand their conviction that God is one.
The different stories of the Hebrew Scriptures
are a series of thought experiments concerning the nature of God,
as they explore different ways of articulating their unique perspective on faith.
Is the ‘one God’ of the Jews a consistent, faithful God, or is he capricious and needy?
Is God a God of war, or of peace?
Does God demand sacrifice, or offer mercy?
The story we heard earlier from Genesis,
of God testing Abraham by asking him to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice,
is just such an example
of ancient Jewish exploration into the nature of their God.
The question being asked here was whether God is the kind of God
who demands a sacrifice from his most faithful follower?
At the beginning of the story, in an echo of the story of Job,
God decides to test the faithfulness of Abraham
by asking something of him that is surely too costly.
But nontheless Abraham and Isaac set off up the hill,
with Isaac carrying his cross, so to speak, on his shoulders.
It’s only at the last moment,
once Abraham has proved himself willing to sacrifice his own dearly beloved son,
that an angel directs him to an alternative sacrifice,
and the ram caught in the thicket is offered in place of the boy.
The temptations to allegorise this story onto the crucifixion of Jesus are strong,
resonating as it does with the gospel stories
of Jesus carrying his own cross to Golgotha,
and dying as a substitute for sinful humans.
But whilst this story of Abraham and Isaac
was clearly in the minds of the gospel writers
as they reflected on the nature of the Easter story,
there is no straightforward allegory to be found here.
Because at the heart of the Abraham and Isaac story
is still a God who demands a sacrifice.
It might not be Isaac in the end,
but the ram still has to die in Isaac’s place
in order that he might live.
And if we simply substitute Jesus for the ram caught in the thicket,
and take this as our understanding of what happens on the cross,
we still end up with a God who demands a sacrifice unto death.
And a God who demands death to satisfy his wrath at human sin
doesn’t sound much like a God who is light,
and in whom there is no darkness at all.
This would be a God of anger, vengeance, and violence,
not a God of life, love, and reconciliation.
The conviction that God is life and light,
articulated so clearly in the first letter of John,
challenges us to reconsider our theology of the cross.
something profound has gone astray.
getting what he requires from an innocent victim,
then we have a view of God which is predicated on death and darkness.
Saying that God substitutes Jesus for us,
in the same way that Abraham substituted the ram for Isaac,
does not solve this problem.
What we need is another way of seeing the cross,
and the story of Jesus gives us exactly this.
The revelation of God in Jesus
is a radical departure from all other views of God
that are predicated on transactional substitutionary atonement.
If the story ended at the cross,
we would be left with a violent God, killing his innocent son,
to satisfy some universal law that sin must be paid for by death.
The empty tomb challenges all understandings of God
which are predicated on darkness and violence.
The events of Easter Sunday tell us that God is about life, not death.
Death is a human thing, not a divine thing.
As frail mortal beings, we live our lives in the shadow of death.
We can postpone it, we can fear it,
we can deny it, but we cannot avoid it.
But God is not about death, God is about life.
And this means that God is not about violence.
When we find ourselves worshipping a God of violence,
I would suggest that we have invented God, once again, in our own image.
If we believe that God demands a sacrifice,
and then offers his son to be that sacrifice,
we are making our thing to be God’s thing,
and that is surely a grave error.
You see, the truth is that violence, suffering, and death
are our experience, not God’s.
Murder is a human action, not a divine one.
Jealously, envy, wrath and rage are human, not godly, emotions.
And the message of the cross is not that God has become like us,
demanding of us a blood sacrifice to atone for our sins.
But rather, the message of the cross is that God has become one of us,
entering into our darkness of suffering and death
to bring light and life, forgiveness and reconciliation.
not the other way around.
The death of Jesus at the hands of sinners
unmasks the depths of human depravity;
it shines the fierce light of God
into the darkest corner of the human psyche;
it reveals the murderous intent that lies deep in each human soul,
and meets that desire for death with an overwhelming gift of life.
The worst thing one human can do to another
is taken by Jesus into his own body on the cross,
and still it is not enough to extinguish the life
that breaks through the darkness of death,
to leave the tomb empty and the darkness defeated.
And so we are called to reassess our view of God,
to lay aside our conceptions of God as angry, violent, and vengeful.
We need to learn the difficult lesson that darkness lies not within the heart of God,
but within our own hearts.
As the author of 1 John puts it,
‘If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves,
and the truth is not in us.’ (v.8)
But…
‘If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins
and cleanse us from all unrighteousness’ (v.9)
This is the good news of God’s love, revealed in the life of Jesus,
it is a story of life and light,
of forgiveness and reconciliation,
of peace and overwhelming love.
The cross is the ultimate demonstration of God’s commitment to life;
to my life, to your life, to our life together.
The challenge for us, as we gather in the presence of God,
is to learn what it is to be born again into the love of God,
to set aside our addictions to violence,
our compulsions to revenge,
and our captivity to malice, guile,
insincerity, envy, and slander. (1 Pet. 2.1)
And let us not deceive ourselves
that these are not part of us,
because darkness lies in all our hearts.
And let us not deceive ourselves
that these are part of God’s nature,
because God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.
Rather, let us find in the story of Christ,
a new way of meeting God,
who comes to us with the gift of light and life,
bringing a new way of seeing ourselves,
where finally we see ourselves as God sees us.
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