Week 20—Thursday John 1:9-11
John 1:9-11
GOD VISITS US IN OUR SIN
We are considering the passage, God “has visited and redeemed his people.” That visitation was the most thoroughgoing ever seen or heard of on this or any other planet. The mother who put her picture in a house of prostitution for her wayward daughter to see, “visited” her daughter. Jesus, in the story of Dostoyevski, when told by a church dignitary that he could go back to heaven, that he was an embarrassment to them as they managed his affairs on earth, then leaned over and kissed the ashen lips of the ecclesiast, “visited” his church. The mother who requested the body of her son from the jail authorities executed for crime and was refused, then requested that she be buried alongside her son in the jail yard, “visited” her boy.
But these, deep as they are, are not as deep as this visitation of God in visiting and redeeming God’s people. For God’s visitation meant identification, not with one chosen person in that person’s sin, but with all the human race in their sin. “All the desperate tides of the world’s sin and woe were forced through the channel of a single heart.” And that heart broke upon the cross.
It is true that the Hindu scriptures say that the All-God is the goodness of the good and “the gambling of the cheat,” but this is pantheism—God is all, sin-included. There is no choice—God’s allness includes all sin. But here in Jesus the Holy God chooses to be identified in love with all the sin of all human beings—chooses it, for being love he must choose it.
And when he chose to be identified with their sin, he chose to be identified with their death, for sin and death are one. And further, sin and death and hell are one—so “he descended into Hell.”
O Love Divine that stooped to share—how deep that sharing is we shall never know. But we know enough so that it makes us tremble—and rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory. It is all beyond us, but deeply in us. It has us. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: If God had not come to me, I could never have gotten to God.