Sermonette - May 7, 2018

As I was praying about, meditating and reflecting upon, asking questions about Sunday’s assigned second reading (1 John 5:1-6), a particular part of the text caught my attention. It was 1 John 5:6a: “This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood.”

While these words may seem strange at first, they do have some relevance to our modern time. The early Christians were engaged in a theological battle with the gnostics. The gnostics thought that the material world was evil and that the key to salvation was to escape the world. Christian gnostics saw Jesus as the Savior from this evil world; but since the material world was evil, the Savior could not be part of this evil world.

Therefore, the gnostics believed that the Spirit of Christ had entered into the body of Jesus, but the Spirit was in fact separate from his material body. In a sense, Christ was masquerading as a human, but in fact was purely spirit according to the gnostics. The biblical writer insists that Jesus came not only by water, which most likely points to his baptism, but also by blood, which most certainly points to his physical birth. To believe that Jesus is the Son of God is to believe in both his spiritual and physical dimensions.

We have a strange sort of gnosticism in our own time. There are a good number of people who proclaim that they accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior; but like the gnostics of old, they want nothing to do with the physical manifestation of Christ’ body in the world, his church. They want to accept the Spirit of Christ because that seems to be a safe abstraction. The physical reality of the church seems to be too filled with “evil” to them and they find it unacceptable to associate with any group “like that.”

The biblical writer would not let the church off so easily. “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the child. But lest we become too abstract in that love, by this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments” (1 John 5:1-2).

To love the child of God is to love the children of God. This biblical truth found in 1 John is a powerful word against the idea of not associating with Christ’s church, his body in the world, because they are perceived as “evil.”

Jesus’ disciples, with full recognition of all their weaknesses and shortcomings, became the foundation of the church. The commandments of God, as 1 John makes clear, cannot be obeyed in the abstract while ignoring the concrete realities of living as human beings. The church, as reflected in the first disciples but continued with the rest of us, is a necessary physical reality of living our response to Christ as Lord and Savior. I pray that we would, indeed, embrace one another as we live out that response. Glory be to God!