Doing for Jesus

I preached one of those sermons yesterday which bore a vague resemblance to the text i had prepared but took off with a life of its own. The question I have been asking myself is the one I posed in Church - what do we do if we really love Jesus - how do we say that?

I was talking in the context of thinking about John's Gospel - that slightly odd fourth Gospel which is a theology more than a history in many ways - but what came to mind was that the real reason that John wrote was because of his faith - because he loved Jesus. He tried to put into words - which are obviously inadequate for the task - his experience of his faith in the context of the story of Jesus. John's Gospel is not an academic treatise on faith but a highly personal apologetic in the sense that unless John had a sense of what it was to abide and to be loved I do not think he would have fallen into that very convoluted language - or rather than he would have run out of words to express what he knew to be true.

How do we express what we know to be true? How do we share our experience of Good News? That is not an easy challenge. It is not easy because it is not about skimming the surface - it is about a dual action of allowing the depth of God's love and reflecting that experience back to the word. All the while we know that nothing will separate us from God but also nothing will express God fully to other people. And so we invite - and that, again, is a challenge.

John's Gospel is an invitation - many people fall in love with it and I think that might be because it offers an image of God which is so complete - a God who has always been and will always be and a God for whom loving relationship matters more than historical accident. John invites his reader to sit at the table and listen to Jesus as he talks about his followers, not just the chosen few, but all those who will come to this place - talks about their wrapped up-ness in divinity and their love.

What we cannot do it ignore it - we love Jesus and that invitation is not a passive one.