Thursday • 3/4/2021
Week of 2 Lent

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 70; Psalm 71; Jeremiah 4:9–10,19–28; Romans 2:12–24; John 5:19–29

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 8 (“The Song of Moses,” Exodus 15, BCP, p. 85); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (“The Song of the Redeemed,” Revelation 15:3–4, BCP, p. 94)

Yesterday, we saw that Jesus’s detractors are upset by his claim to be “equal with God” (John 5:18). In today’s reading in John, Jesus begins carefully and patiently (and yet also quite plainly) to unpack what his being “equal with God” means. 

First, Jesus’s equality with his Father does not put him in competition with his Father: “…the Son can do nothing on his own” (John 5:19). He’s not like Apollo, who supplanted his father Zeus in Greek mythology. God’s Son is not in any way running his own “program,” or pursuing his own agenda. During the history of the church, the Father and the Son have, at times, been wrongly placed in opposition to each other. Some have imagined an angry Father needing to be placated by a supplicant Son. John’s Gospel provides a perfect antidote against that wrong kind of thinking. It asserts, “God so loved the world that he sent…” (John 3:16). At the heart of the dynamic between Father and Son is mutual love. Amazing love, how can it be!

Second, the Son shares the Father’s power to raise the dead and to give them life (John 5:21). What will differentiate Father and Son in this regard is that as a man, the Son will taste and defeat death from within death itself. His giving of life will be on the far side of his having received—as one of us!—the same life that he will confer. Unfathomable mystery! 

Third, just like his Father, Jesus the Son has an eternal, non-derivative life within himself: “For just as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself” (John 5:26). Thus, Jesus anticipates and provides in John’s Gospel an argument to the later heretical Arians who believed that Jesus was not eternal, but merely the first created being in the world.. Because of what Jesus says here, the maturing church of the fourth century was able to assert that while the Son is “eternally begotten of the Father,” there was “never a time in which he was not and had to be born.” More glorious mystery! 

Fourth, the Son, as much as the Father, has authority to judge. His mission, indeed, is not to bring condemnation, but rather, in love, to bear condemnation on behalf of an errant human race (John 3:16–17). However, he, no less than his Father, has authority to judge. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner!

Fifth, the Son has the right to receive the same “honor” as the Father (John 5:23). In fact, Jesus boldly says, we can’t honor the Father without honoring his Son as well. Sometimes, Christians are accused of being “Jesusolaters” in our worship of Jesus. Well, we do worship Jesus, though not as an independent, stand-alone, deity. We both worship the Father through Jesus our worship leader, and we worship Jesus as equal in authority and as one in very nature with his Father. The math is complicated (especially when you consider, as other Scriptures require us to do, the deity of the Holy Spirit as well). But the math works: we worship one God in three Persons. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, world without end! Amen!

We noted a few weeks ago, on the Feast of St. John (transferred, 12/28), that John’s Gospel became associated with the “eagle,” because of its soaring and majestic perspective on Jesus’s identity. I pray this outlook on who Jesus is creates in us power to persevere in whatever hardship we face, courage and hope for whatever task lies before us, and a passion for worship and praise all the days of our lives. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+ 

Image: Detail from St. John the Evangelist, Basilica di San Vitale (AD 526-548), Holly Hayes photo. https://www.flickr.com/photos/sacred_destinations/2880428337/in/album-72157604983837920/