Wednesday, January 11, 2023

 

Wednesday, January 11, 2023


Psalms 28; 29

Genesis 2:4-25

John 6:60-71


The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.


We humans are a funny combination of bits and pieces. I’m not talking about opposable thumbs, or how we have big toes instead of tails to keep us upright. Nor do I mean the fact that we have digestive systems that love bran cereal yet tongues that love chocolate rice bubbles.


The most curious thing about what makes a human is found in today’s reading in Genesis. God has made matter, and moulded that matter into all sorts of different amazing combinations: light, rain, soil, plants, animals and so on. Then He took that matter and made a human being. To complete this work, the highest work of His creation, He breathed into it.


Something to bear in mind whenever we read about breath, wind, or spirit in the Bible is that in the Greek, it is all the same root word: pneuma, from which we get the English word pneumatic. It is one of the reasons why we can marvel at Jesus’ wordplay in His conversation with Nicodemus: He drew the attention of Nicodemus to the wind blowing outside, and used the same word for the Holy Spirit.


This is why human beings are a funny combination: we are made of matter, such as the rest of this physical universe; but we also are spirit. God breathed spirit into us at our creation, the spirit of life. When we fell, this spiritual life was compromised. But then Jesus comes along and says that the words that He speaks are that spirit and life. Spirit and life which is both what we need to survive, and that which He first breathed into us when He drew us out of the earth as our Creator.


Jesus has now taught us the same thing using three different methods. He has taught us that He is the living water, that which quenches our spiritual thirst. He has also taught us that He is the bread of heaven, that which our spirit needs to feed on to survive. Now He has taught us that His words are of the same thing that God breathed into Adam.


The character Spock from Star Trek described humans as “ugly bags of mostly water”. Without the words of Jesus, that is, without spirit and life, that is indeed what we are. But once Jesus speaks, we are lifted from a cosmic joke to a cosmic marvel: the image of God, ruling over creation as His representatives, representatives of God’s love to other humans and a universe that desperately needs nothing less than the words of spirit and life proceeding from the mouth of Jesus.


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