All Things TogetherNäide

Day 3

HELD TOGETHER IN CHRIST

Apprenticeship to Jesus is intensely analog. Radically em­bodied. It is specific in time and place and personhood. The Christian faith is not a generality or theory. It isn’t an abstrac­tion. It isn’t anonymous. It is not downloadable. It is earthy and bodily. Full of things like DNA sequences, gnarled fam­ily trees, quirky love stories, birth pains, death throes, finger­prints, and scars.

And the cure for the pervasive dis-integration of the human being is also strangely particular: Jesus, the blue-collar King from Nowhereville Nazareth, born of the virgin Mary. If this curious man whose arrival split the calendar of all history in half is truly the Son of God in human flesh, then appren­ticeship to this Jesus is essential to becoming truly human. He is integral.Only union with Him will unite what is riven in us. Through the agency of His Word (Jesus, the Word made flesh),God is at work again weaving shalom, re-gardening the world.

In Jesus Christ, “all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17, ESV). The Greek is Ta panta en Christoi synesteken, which can be translated as “All things cohere in Christ.” In this Jesus, the fullness of God dwells bodily. He is reconciling what has tragically been fractured, and He is making peace (reweaving shalom) through His sacrificial love. He is the Maker making all things right. He is the origin of all that is created, the aim for which it was always intended, and so He Himself is the way by which all things become what they were designed to be.

The unifying principle of reality is the unifying person of Jesus Christ. This one who is behind the enigmatic strong force that holds protons and neutrons together in their atomic dance, whose steadfast love holds our bodies and our com­munities together, whose wisdom holds the stars in their fiery splendor, is the very one we are called to be with and become like. No wonder the Scriptures say the followers of Jesus will “shine like stars” (see Daniel 12:3).

What does it mean to you that the unifying principle of reality is not an idea, but a person—Jesus Christ?