Week 18—Tuesday 1 John 4:1-3
1 John 4:1-3
“FIFTEEN BOOKS TO EXPLAIN NOTHINGNESS”
Concerning the universal Christ, you can speculate interminably, but concerning the historic Jesus you are confined to the facts. The books on theology are innumerable; the Gospels are just four brief accounts. Shankara, the great Hindu philosopher, wrote fifteen books to explain Maya, or Illusion. And he came out to neti—not that! When asked to define Maya simply, he replied, “Maya is a son of a barren woman.” When you give yourself to words you must say in the end, Neti. But when you speak of Jesus, you may say, “Yes. This.”
It is interesting and illuminating that all the so-called messiahs who have come through the ages have said that they were “another Christ,” not another Jesus. For into the “Christ” they could put their own imaginative content and that content would not be Jesus, for Jesus died to redeem a race and none of the so-called messiahs have been ready to undertake that role. There they were the Word become word, not the Word become flesh.
Sir Edwin Hodkyns asks:
Can you study a word and discover a universe; can you learn a language and awake to the truth; can you lose yourself in a lexicon and arise in the presence of God?
Yes, if that “word” is the Word made flesh; if that “language” is the Language of Eternity translated into the Speech of Time—the one Name before which every knee shall bow; and if that “lexicon” is not a lexicon but a Life. For in the presence of that Life you are in the presence of God.
So we begin with Jesus and from him we work out to God and from him we work down to us. In his life we see Light.
O Jesus, you are so near—so near that if I reach out to touch you, I reach too far. For “you are nearer than breathing and closer than hands and feet.” You are the Life of my life, the Joy of my joy. You are my glorious universe. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: If someone should cut open my heart, would the name of Christ be found engraved there? Yes!