The Gospel of Christ – Br. Todd Blackham

Acts 28:16-20, 30-31
Psalm 11:4-8
John 21:20-25

I finished a novel the other day.  It was a really good one.  And now that it’s over I’m left a bit forlorn.  I would have loved this one to be a big multi-book series that could get turned into 8 or 9 movies.  But it’s not.  And it’s over now.  As we’ve been working our way through this final chapter of John I’ve had the same kind of feelings I have at the end of a book or a great film.  This longing for more, one more scene, one more chapter.

I think I must have been around 19 years old when I first heard someone talk about this passage at the end of John and it has stuck with me for 20 years.  “There are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”

The good news of Jesus continues to be written on your hearts, in your lives among those you share life with.  You are the gospel of Christ.  And not in some gauzy, divine essence hidden in the deepest cavern of your soul.  The good news of Jesus is present and active in the tangible ways that you have been met by love.  In the ways that you have been rescued from sin and shame.  In the ways that love has defied the pattern of this world and transformed you by the renewing of your mind in Christ.  And it does keep going.

I can’t say that this feels like some glittering moment of grace.  Right now, I feel more like one of those bumbling disciples, just not quite getting it, struggling to make sense of where I am.  And it’s painful and confusing.  But I keep showing up.  ‘Twas grace that brought me safe thus far and grace will lead me home.

Sometimes you just have to keep turning the pages to find out what happens next.  Peter might have been given some inkling of what would befall him.  I can only imagine what John felt as one by one his fellow apostles met their martyrdoms.  What we know is that he knew himself to be Christ’s beloved.

We might hope for some grand calling that would lift us out of the mundane cares of the world but even those lives are a series of simple, steadfast acts of loving obedience taken a moment at a time.

At the end of that novel I finished, as the hero was entrusting a great responsibility to a young man she said, “You’re not destined or chosen, I wish I could tell you that you were if that would make it easier, but it’s not true. You’re in the right place at the right time, and you care enough to do what needs to be done. Sometimes that’s enough.”

Jesus, in love says “Follow me.”  The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come.”  Jesus is doing many other things and your life is daily being written, the good news of Jesus Christ.