This morning, before going to church, I had a brief online conversation with a trusted friend and valued colleague, about the many failings in church leadership that we are seeing around us, even in some people we know far and near.
Then I shared with him that in all the failures that I have seen in 40 years of pastoral, ecumenical, denominational, and now higher theological education work, Narcissus loomed large in all the stories of their downfall. Narcissus was a mythological figure from the poem of the Greek poet, Ovid, who was so impossibly handsome that he fell in love with his own image reflected in a pool of water. He was so handsome and proud of his countenance that he rejected all romantic advances on him but, instead, fell in love with his own reflection. When Narcissus realized that his reflection cannot love him back, he withered and died of melancholy. We see the sad consequences of this covetous self-absorption and self-love strain and distort the lives of essentially healthy people.
Then I found our conversation suddenly finding its way into my own hightened internal awareness of the present season of Lent, the solemn Christian religious observance in the liturgical year commemorating the 40 days Jesus Christ spent fasting in the desert and enduring temptation by Satan, before beginning his public ministry. All those temptations were about the aggrandizement of the self. And the way Jesus overcame the temptations, was a total repudiation of worldly power and hubris. God’s kingdom of love, where God reigns, is also the realm of God’s kenosis, God’s self-emptying in Jesus Christ.
And then when I went to church, the scripture text for the sermon message was on John chapter 3, and the verses 19-21 in particular became another piece of cloth that was stitched onto what already was a thematic quilt of thoughts and reflections from the conversation with my friend earlier in the morning:
“And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.”
We have seen the light, and it leads to life abundant, and the full flourishing of our God-given potential here on earth. We are called to be participants, co-workers with God, in making the kingdom of love visible here on earth, as it is in heaven. It is the life God wills for each of us to have, and to live.
Elmo Familiaran 