“I am…the life…”

                 The crowd was growing steadily as the seconds passed by.  In a public high school, that could indicate something bad was starting to go down.  But not this time.  A young male student was unbuttoning his shirt.  He flipped it down from his shoulders revealing a huge tattoo that covered his entire back.  It represented lots of time and lots of painful needlework to get it right.  But that’s not all it represented.

Now it was done and time to be admired, and the students who gathered around “oohed” and “ahhed” when they saw it.  Then a Christian teacher saw the little gathering and slid into the crowd.  “What’s it supposed to be?” he asked.  “Death,” said the student.  “It represents death.  I’m really into it, man.”  “Death, huh?” replied the teacher.  “Yeah, me and my friend are thinking of killing ourselves this weekend,” came the response in all seriousness.  “Let me show you something,” said the teacher, reaching into his pocket.  Pulling out a picture from his wallet, he said, “You see this?  This is my wife.  That’s life.  See this?  These are my kids.  They’re life too.  See this?  Here are some of my friends.  They’re life as well.  You know what?  You haven’t lived long enough to appreciate life.  You don’t know what it is.  So let me make a suggestion.  See if you can make it to next Monday.  And then the Monday after that, and the one after that.  One week at a time.  And if you make it, one of these days you’ll have lived long enough to appreciate what life really is.  Cause right now, you just don’t know what you’re talking about.”

While the teacher wasn’t being precise, he wasn’t too far off.  What exactly is life anyway?  Ever look up the definition in a dictionary?  What you typically see is descriptions of biological, chemical or spiritual life.  Words like function, metabolism, growth, reproduction and existence.  But these sound pretty abstract or theoretical, and seem like they relate more to some kind of scientific research laboratory.

Life is many things, but it all begins with God.  “In Him was life,” John 1:4 says about the Word, who is Christ.  John uses the word life 36 times, more than any other New Testament writer or book.  It is an attribute or quality of God.  He gets more specific in his first epistle.  Having introduced the book with what he and the other disciples had “heard…seen…looked at…and…touched,” he writes, “this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.  The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us” (vs. 1-2).  Life is something that is shared and communicated.  It began with the Triune God.  Then the living and communing God sent a representative to earth in our form to relate to us.  John called this relating fellowship (vs. 3-4).

Since it is to be shared, life is a gift.  You can’t buy it.  Talking to the pluralistic pagan philosophers at the Areopagus on Mars Hill in Athens, Paul said that God “gives all men life and breath and everything else” (Acts 17:25).  This was more than just the technicalities of biological existence on planet Earth.  Notice that his living creatures share — to a lesser degree, of course — in a limited form of life from God.  Peoples’ lives are full of sharing what they have with others: work, games, parties, time, experiences of every kind.  Similarly he gives another kind of life, which is better: “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no on can snatch them out of my hand” (John 10:28).  What characterizes this life?  Not necessarily duration, but that’s a part of it.  Not even the quality, another component.  Probably its most salient feature is again the idea of shared existence:  “Now this is eternal life: that [believers] may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3).  So when Lazarus died in John 11 from sickness, Mary and Martha lost not only their brother, but also part of their own lives of sharing with him.  That’s why it hurts when loved ones close to us die.  Martha knew her theology: “I know he [Lazarus] will rise again in the resurrection at the last day” (v. 24).  Pretty good understanding of things, considering Jesus hadn’t died yet.  But that wouldn’t restore that lost part of their lives now.  Mary’s brokenness confirmed that something needed to be done…immediately.  Jesus demonstrated that he is “the resurrection and the life” by bringing Lazarus back.  “He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will live even though he dies” (vs. 25-26).

Therefore, to have life, life from God, means sharing in the things of God, giving to and receiving from him, communing with his people, serving him, sharing him with others.  How are you living today?