Wednesday of the Second Week of Easter
John 3:16 - It’s a verse emblazoned on posters and billboards. Sometimes, it feels like this verse gets weaponized and shouted at one another, as if to say, ”You must say believe, or you will go to hell!” I don’t think this is what John intended in this line, much less what God intends. Too often, when we hear this word, “belief,” we think it means something that happens only in the head and is professed primarily with our words.
At the beginning of his gospel, John says that the Word (Christ) became flesh and lived among us. The Incarnation, the mystery that God becomes flesh, is central to our faith. Our belief must also become flesh. We believe with our whole bodies. We are called to love God with heart, mind, and soul, and our neighbor as ourselves. We are called to give food to those who have none, to shelter those have no home or who are fleeing unsafe homes, to visit those who are in prison…Our Christian belief is bodily, incarnational.
This is what we witness the community in Acts doing just before we enter the scene in today’s reading. The community is preaching, healing, holding all things in common, and meeting the needs of the people. It is not their intellectual belief or only their words that are threatening to some people; it is the way their radical embodied love challenges the system. They believe in Christ’s Incarnation and Resurrection with their whole being. Their belief is evidenced in the freedom they have found to live in love. This freedom in Christ does not fear the leaders, it does not fear the courts; in Christ the darkness is driven away. Even in the face of imprisonment and death, this freedom does not shout or express violent defiance, not even in violent words. To choose violence is to choose darkness.
Followers of the way of Jesus Christ do not shout good news at others. We do not preach fear of darkness. Instead, we invite others into the light with words and actions. We embody the light as best we can. We let the light of Christ shine through us in ways that are unarmed and disarming. In all things, with God’s grace, we choose love. We give God’s love flesh in our flesh, practicing an incarnational belief in Christ and trusting that the resurrection is ours too. In Christ, there is nothing to fear.
God so loved the world that God sent his only Son so that everyone who believes may have eternal life. Like the early followers of Christ, may we practice an incarnational resurrection faith!
—Kelly Adamson