Who Gives Us Life?

Sunday, May 11, 2025 – Acts 9:36-43, Psalm 23, Revelation 7:9-17, John 10:22-30

Who gives us life? In the everyday sense, we know that our mothers give us life (with our fathers’ help of course!). There’s not a human soul who has ever walked the earth that was not birthed by a mother. Many women, like me, have never been mothers, but we’ve all come from a mother. And so, it’s fitting that we take this day to honor our mothers. Our mothers give us life.

We don’t know if the Tabitha in our first reading was a mother, but we do know that she was beloved and honored by the women in her community. They not only mourned her passing deeply but they tearfully and proudly displayed her handiwork to Peter. Tabitha was important and would never be forgotten.

And we can assume that Tabitha’s mother gave her life – the first time. But it was Peter – through the power of the risen Christ – that gave her life the second time.

In our text from Revelation, life is given by the Lamb. Here we read of the throngs of people robed in white and we’re told that they “have come out of the great ordeal.” What is the “great ordeal”? We are living in it here on earth. This life is the great ordeal.

I’ve listened to dozens of accounts of near-death experiencers (here, here, and here), and all of them have come back with the understanding that what some call “earth school” is about learning, trials, and tribulations. In this realm there is suffering but just like in Revelation’s vision, once we leave the embodied life of this great ordeal, these accounts say that there’s no more pain, only compassion, love, and light.

In Revelation, new life is given by the Lamb, and in the Psalm, life is given by the Good Shepherd. These texts speak of life, death, and new life. But they also invite us to think about the relationship between the spiritual realm and the material world.

Here in the “great ordeal,” it’s very tempting for us to think about the spiritual and material realms as completely separate. As if God is “up there” on a throne above the clouds and we are “down here” in the mud pit struggling to stand. If we’re honest, sometimes it seems as if God is in hiding, and we can easily think we’re alone here and that God’s life in spirit is completely divorced from our lives in body.

But that’s what’s utterly unique about Christianity. Christianity is all about incarnation. It’s all about the divine being born in this world. Incarnation is not about a divorce between the spiritual and the material. It’s about their marriage.

There’s a saying traced back to ancient thinkers that says, “As above, so below,” which suggests that there’s a mirroring relationship between the spiritual and the material realms. What happens “above” is mirrored in what happens “below.”

I see this clearly in our gospel. When Christ says “I and the Father are one,” it means that there is a link – an unbreakable relationship – between God and Jesus here among us. But here’s the kicker: I don’t think Jesus is saying that only he and the Father are one. Let me unpack that a little bit. Here we need to understand the background of John’s gospel and how it’s different from the other three gospels.

All the gospels claim Jesus as divine. His followers experienced him as uniquely revealing something about God’s heart and life. But the gospels establish that claim differently.

In Mark, there’s no birth narrative, and so Mark tells us nothing about a special birth. In Mark, it’s not until Jesus’s baptism that he is anointed by God as the divine Christ. But Matthew and Luke establish Jesus’s divinity at his conception. His birth, too, is marked by activities of the heavens (the star, angels, wise men/astrologers, etc.).

But John goes even further and establishes Jesus’s relationship to God all the way back at the creation of the world, in the Word or Logos. In this gospel, the Word/Logos was “in the beginning,” it was “with God,” and it “was God.”

What else could possibly be with God and also God, but another person of the Trinity? This text tells us that the Word/Logos is the second person of the Trinity, or the Son. Remember, the Trinity is all about dynamic relationship within God’s own life, what Richard Rohr calls the divine dance.

John is saying that the Christ – or the messianic role Jesus fulfills – arises not at Jesus’s baptism, nor even at his birth, but that this divine Christ appears at the creation of the world itself, long before Jesus was born in the flesh.

John’s Christ is cosmic and transcendent, going way beyond Jesus in human form. Yet at the same time, John is saying that this human Jesus is somehow bound up with or incarnating this eternal or cosmic Christ.

Also unique to the gospel of John are what’s called the “I am” phrases. Jesus says: “I am the bread of life” (John 6:35, 48, 51), “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12; 9:5), “I am the door” (John 10:7, 9), “I am the good shepherd” (John 10:11, 14), “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25), “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), and “I am the true vine” (John 15:1, 5).

Where else in the Bible does the phrase “I am” appear? In Genesis, when God gives the divine name as “I am who I am.” In this way, too, John links Jesus to God at the genesis of the story of God’s relationship to humanity.

This leads many scholars to conclude that in John’s gospel, whenever Jesus uses the “I am” statements or says “I and the Father are one,” Jesus is speaking as the cosmic, eternal Christ, not as the human Jesus.

This cosmic, eternal Christ existed before the human Jesus was born. It’s through this second person of the Trinity, this cosmic reality that was incarnated at the creation of the world, that we are joined eternally to the life of God.

So, when John’s Jesus also says, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish,” we might ask, what is this eternal life that Christ gives and how is it different from the life that our mothers give us? What does it mean to never perish?

Not perishing means more than just not dying.

To never perish, to have eternal life, means to be important enough to never be forgotten. It means to be taken up into the very heart and life of God and to be held in God’s loving arms forever. This is what the Christ – the Good Shepherd and the Lamb – gives us.

When we remember him – in our baptisms, in the eucharist, in our loving actions toward those around us, and even in the way we honor our mothers – we are given new life, new ways of being, and the promise that – through the eternal, cosmic Christ, the universal incarnation – we and the Father are also one.