2023-01-19 A Meditation on the First Chapter

“So Jesus said to them, “The light is among you for a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you. The one who walks in the darkness does not know where he is going.” (Jn 12:35 ESV)

Turning things bright, reappraising memories, warmer climes. Turns out in our poverty God was acting. In our fleeting time together, God was beckoning. In love we work for a severe Master but a measured, good friend. All have hangups and distractions. All have the impossibility of a divisive idea in friend, alternate’s, mind. All warm to the patently “Christian” commune, people genuinely nursing at the master’s breast, making space and propriety for all comers, praying for others.

And all are not Christian, by similar measure. Patently Christian ideas are glancing off of folks, as attacks on their inner constitution. Radical outlays, preposterous proposals, simple acknowledgement, pointing, to a God Above, and “He must increase and I decrease”, brings us home to a literally “real” church body called capital-C Church.

So we are the fledgling spiritualists, accepting this momentary warmer clime, even if personal fussiness would be ever withdrawing and holding out for better, more ambitious, locales. Even if personally we feel a stirring or brewing discord. Even if it is across enemy lines that the celebration of life occurs; even if we are rare amongst the crowd as being ones coached in True War.

For an enemy has sowed counter-intelligence, or rather, we are ourselves in counter-intelligence, against the guise of a spy. Against the guise of an instigator. Against the guise of a malcontent, rumor-mongering, gossip-spreading, verbally murderous regime. Ideas are dangerous, yet beautiful and right is the unwillingness of the intermediary quite to go so far. The intermediary, slickly and conspiratorially “programmed” from afar, isn’t quite so evil as to go “that far”. They pass on the preconception (an evil preconception) but don’t see it as necessitating outright “war”. They have healthy confidence that though this is war (as all can see) that love and patience and frontline Incarnate work is all that the Scriptures beckon us to.

So the analyst and the counter-intel, each of us, spreading, taking over the searching and humble hearts of God’s people; that is, meeting people with saving knowledge, even as our petty qualms are of a more reserved nature: trouble on the home front, ennui, downpressed spirits, guilt, an inimical situation with friends or family, simple difficulty staying focused on the Gospel. For we stay near to Gospel truth, despite a doubting and ignorant world. Our memories are brightened with causes for thanksgiving this day: thank the Lord for exploratory peace, for those people who may not have gotten in to the most fashionable colleges or career tracks, yet are the Lord’s treasure trove, are doing with earnest thought and outlay the works of Creation, in God, in Jesus, in Christ. Yet they are judged.