Jesus: the interface between time and eternity

Believe me when I say that I am in the Father, and the Father is in me..." Jesus - (John 14:11) Read vs 8-14
- Star image from the Internet

I love the language the Great Teacher uses here, teaching all the time about the nature of God. Jesus is the interface of time and eternity, the known and the unknown, spirit and matter, the natural and the supernatural.

This is what we understand as Incarnation, another moment when God - in Jesus - broke quite literally into time and space. We have no adequate language for God; we have no way to conceptualize such eternity, perfection, completeness, omniscience; such holiness. The Jews were right when they gave God a name that could not - should not - be pronounced. Yet Jesus called the Father "Abba", Daddy. And then he said that we, too, could know God in the same way.

Today in John 14 we see not only how God's intentions were focused into a temporal world through the prism of Jesus Christ, but also how the Creator intends to continue such a tangible intervention in time and space through all of us privileged to call ourselves Jesus-followers.

Not only can we each develop a personal relationship with the Triune God - through Jesus, we can continue his work when we live and pray in the name of Christ.

God seeks to continue this incredible thrust of being, this breaking in, through the everyday lives of ordinary people like us. "Don't you know me...?" Jesus asks Philip; "even after I have been among you such a long time?"

On Christmas Eve we light the Christ candle, eventually passing the light throughout the ever brightening church. If the fire marshals would let us, we would take our candles with us, through the open doors and into the rest of our lives, symbolizing the imperative to take the truth about God into all the world.

It's a wonderful image, and Jesus promised not only to charge us but to equip us too. "I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing!" That amounts to spectacular news! It is astonishing news for this world.

"Take the trouble to know me," Jesus is continuing the thought from the question Thomas had posed earlier. "Take the trouble to know me and you will also know the Father. If you know God's will, and pray accordingly, then greater things still are going to happen because you dare the commitment."

PRAYER: Use me, Lord, use even me. Take me; melt me; mold me; fill me. Amen