How will others see and testify?

 ‘…And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God....’ (John 1:34)

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John 1:29-34 Year A: 2^nd Sunday after Epiphany Sunday 15^th January 2017)

Offices of newspapers and broadcast media are known to have a special filing cabinet with prepared obituaries for former Taoisigh, Monarchs, famous singers, business leaders, politicians (usually men), church men (usually men) and all sorts of notable persons near and far.  Now, it would be a preposterous idea for you or me to be somewhere in that filing cabinet. However, some day and somehow our time will come. The three certainties of life are, as we know only too well since the age of reason: ageing, illness and death. That’s life. But, what sort of memory and legacy will we leave to those closest and dearest?  We will continue to live in the minds of those closest to us (for all the right reasons one hopes!). But, more importantly, our actions will have made a positive difference to at least the next seven generations. Our actions, words and decisions, today, will ripple out in a thousand ways across the generations just as, without realising it, our great great grandparents made decisions and acted in particular ways that helped shape who we are today (including the obvious point that we would not exist today were it not for our great great grandparents and theirs and so on back along the tree of humanity). Much is stored in our awareness and in who we are that is inherited ‘material’. Yet, we have an extraordinary and blessed freedom to choose and to decide and to act.

In the chaos of our lives the Spirit hovers over us and comes down upon us in many ways such as in the small and in the great events of our mundane lives.  In hovering over us the Spirit recreates our world and helps make us into new creatures.  The image of the Easter (Paschal) lamb who was sacrificed (1 Corinthians 5:7-8) meets the Spirit who re-news and re-creates the face of the earth (Genesis 1:2).

The title of ‘Lamb of God’ invoked by John the Baptist sounds strange to our ears. Biblical commentator, William Barclay, talks of the lamb of God in the following way:

In one word it sums up the love, the sacrifice, the suffering and the triumph of Christ.

This image should not be lost. It complements the image of Jesus, the Son of God, as the Shepherd who is prepared to lay down his life for his sheep. Now, the image switches to Jesus as lamb who is led to the slaughter in a way that saves us and brings us home.

Who is this ‘Son of God’? The term ‘Son of God’ is difficult to unpack for many of us inhabiting a very different culture and associated terminology in the 21^st century. One way to express the point of John’s witness at the Jordan is to say that, like John, we too can say in all honesty at the end of our lives that we have seen and have testified that God-in-Jesus is:

• The ground of my being
• The soul of my soul
• The lover of my soul
• The reason and purpose of my life.

To date, in the course of the last 15 years I have accompanied three close persons in the very final moments of their life journey.  Two were my parents and one was an uncle. Truly I can say that I have seen and can now testify that I met three remarkable souls surely touched by the grace of God. But, as some of us are in the front line now, what of the next line behind us? Will we witness in truth and love to these who write our obituaries? Will the flame be passed on?