Daily Lesson for December 27, 2017

Today’s Daily Lesson is in commemoration of the Feast of St John.

I have great admiration for John, the brother of James. Amidst all the hyper masculinity of his time and the community of the disciples, there was in John a certain tenderness. He wrote of love, and our call to love one another. He wrote of himself as beloved. He wrote of our ability to love others because we know we are first loved by God (1 John 4:19).  When I think of John, I think of the image of the Last Supper, with the beloved disciple reclining next to Jesus. Or as Longfellow described it, with “his head upon the Saviour’s breast”.  There is intimacy in that image, there is trust, there is love and being loved. 

After the Resurrection, John lived what must have been a kind of lonely and solitary life. Many, if not all, of the other disciples were martyred for their faith and John was sent into exile on the Isle of Patmos. The Church has remembered him as “a martyr of intention”.  He was not martyred. He did not die for his faith; he did not receive that glory. Instead, he dreamt, and he wrote and he passed on the faith to the next generation. He shared with others the beauty of love and of being beloved. He shared with them first hand the beauty of meeting and falling in love with the one who is Very Love of Very Love. No, he did not die for his beloved Jesus; he lived for him.

The old Chasidic master Rabbi Zusya once had a dream wherein he saw the heavenly court on the Day of Judgment that is to come. The Rabbi described what he saw and heard, saying that God did not ask him, “Why weren’t you Moses?” but rather, “Why were you not Zusya?”

We are each and all beloved. We each have our own calling and journey. We have to take our own way. We each have to live the life of the beloved in our own way, and not somebody else’s. 

St John shows us how.