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1

ANNO DOMINI

  In identifying dates in history, we use the letters BC to indicate the years before the birth of Christ. We identify all subsequent years by the letters AD, which stand for Anno Domini, the year of the Lord. Notice that we do not refer to those years as AC, after Christ. This is perhaps the most startling claim our faith makes. It is the basis of all our hope, namely that there is no such thing as time after Christ. Jesus Christ is alive today. We live in his time.

  For a Christian believer there are only two periods of history, the time before Christ and the time of Christ. But often, by the way we speak and act, we Christians seem to suggest that there are three periods of history: the time before Christ, described in the Old Testament; the time of Christ, as described in the New Testament; and the time after Christ, which is the rest of history and, for us, today, is this modern age. This way of thinking leads to greatly reduced expectations of our faith. It encourages us to accept a very watered-down version of our Christian hope. It deprives us of power and spiritual nourishment. The Good News of our faith is that we live in the time of Jesus Christ. He is alive and among us. We can meet him and have his friendship. He is doing or wants to do among us what he did when he entered our world in the incarnation.

  The Good News of our faith is eternally modern. It is a ‘today’ thing. It is always a ‘now’ event. It is happening. It is Good News. It is not a ‘history’ of good things that God did in former days. It is not a ‘prophecy’ of good things that God will do in future when we become more worthy of his love. No! It is what God is doing or wants to do for us right now. It is ‘news’. When we open the daily newspaper, we expect to read about what is happening right now in the world about us. We would not accept last week’s newspaper from our newsagent. The gospel message is not only news, it is good news telling us about God’s presence and activity here and now in our lives. This activity is re-creating, healing and liberating. The message of the good news is spoken afresh all the time and is addressed to me by name. I am not a spectator of revealed truth being handed to someone else and passed on to me. I am the addressee. The message is spoken to my heart and if I listen with faith, the words become reality in my life. After Jesus announced the good news in the synagogue of Nazareth, he looked at his audience and said ‘This text is being fulfilled today even as you listen’ (Luke 4:22).

  The words that God speaks to us through Jesus are different from all other words. Scripture calls them ‘living words’. These living words, which are as fresh and alive as God himself in every age, reveal God’s very inner being which is love. The Bible is not a book of information about God aimed at my intellect. It is the self-revelation of God’s heart aimed at my heart. The word is ‘I love you’. Faith is not a matter of looking for correct intellectual answers to difficult questions about the existence and nature of God. Faith involves my answer to the one, all-important question which he puts to me: ‘ Do you love me?’ It was the question put to Peter at the lakeside of Tiberias after the resurrection. (John 21:15).

  This very question put to us by God brings us into a world of wonder and mystery. It tells us we are ‘the sought-after’ (Isaiah 62:12) God seeks our love. We think of St. Augustine’s words: ‘You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.’ It has been so from the beginning. The first book of the Bible describes God walking in the garden with the first man and woman. He strolls with them in the evening, chatting as friend with friend. Then the dialogue is interrupted. Something goes wrong. Evil is present. Sin follows. The conversation breaks down. God’s friends experience shame, fear and guilt, and they hide. God, their friend, is not happy. He wants the friendship to continue and searches for his friends. ‘Adam, where are you?’ (Genesis 3:9) – and the answer comes, ‘I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.’

   God did not give up on his friends. He continued to search for them, to search for us. He sent message after message through many prophets, through many years. Through these years the guilt increased. When misfortune came, people saw it as God’s revenge and anger and they cried out, ’Yahweh has abandoned me, the Lord has forgotten me’ (Isaiah 49:14). They are far away from knowing the mystery of God’s love. Yahweh answered their cry:

'Does a woman forget her baby at the breast
or fail to cherish the son of her womb?
Yet even if these forget,
I will never forget you.'

  Despite this beautiful word, fear still held sway. Guilt erected great barriers, terrible walls. And the fear and guilt were reinforced by false teachers, self-righteous people who felt sure they knew what God was like. These teachers told people that they were outcasts and that their sickness and misfortune were punishments from an angry God. Such teaching was a great dark cloud obscuring the sunshine of God’s love.

  What can God do? He seeks us and wants to convince our hearts of his love. He has spoken many words of love through the prophets. What more can he do? He will speak one more word, his greatest and clearest word. But now he will take no more chances. He will not rely on spoken words which can be misunderstood and misinterpreted. He will send his Son, he will send his word in the flesh. ‘The Word was made flesh, he lived among us’ (John 1:14). The bright warm sunshine of God’s love broke through that dark cloud of guilt, fear and false teaching and shone upon us. The love of God became visible in Jesus. God would once again walk on earth and talk with his friends, man and women, and he does not seem to mind that they are labelled ‘sinners’ by the self-righteous. He is happy to be called ‘friend of sinners’. We are still ‘the sought-after’, even in our sins.

  ‘At various times in the past and in various different ways, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets, but in our own time, the last days, he has spoken to us through his Son.’ (Hebrews 1:1-2). Notice ‘in our own time’, Jesus speaks now. It is Paul’s time, it is Peter’s time, it is our time, anno domini. He speaks to me, to us, today. We know from the gospel the extraordinary power of the words of Jesus. People hung on his words. They forgot about food as they followed him out into the desert to listen to him. They said ‘There has never been anybody who has spoken like him’ (John 7:46). These words have not lost their power as they are spoken afresh to us today. His teaching was different from that of the Scribes and Pharisees. ‘His teaching made a deep impression on them because, unlike the scribes, he taught them with authority.’ (Mark 1:22).

  Jesus speaks with authority. Let us understand this well. There is deep meaning in this word ‘authority’ which we could miss, quite different from our ordinary understanding. The authority with which Jesus speaks is not something external to the word he speaks. Jesus is not saying ‘I am your new religious teacher and you must listen and believe because I say it.’ He is not even saying ‘I am the Son of God and so you must accept my word.’ Something more wonderful is happening. The authority is in the very word itself. He speaks the Truth. The Truth needs no authority outside of itself to command obedience. When people hear the word of Jesus, it touches the deepest part of themselves, the heart and centre of each person made in God’s image. His word reaches that deep centre and, wonderful to relate, an echo comes back from that deep place, an echo which agrees and says Amen.

   Here lies the power of Truth, its nourishing and transforming power. We are made for Truth. The word of Jesus is the Truth. Jesus himself, the word made flesh, is the Truth. Our deepest good self, made in God’s image, hears, ‘knows’ and responds to this Truth which is Jesus. He himself said that his followers know his voice. ‘The sheep hear his voice, one by one he calls his own sheep. He goes ahead of them and the sheep follow because they know his voice’ (John 10:3-4). Jesus speaks our name in love and our deepest self recognises him and his word. Maybe we cannot describe this exactly to others, but we ‘know’ that something beautiful and mysterious is happening. St. Paul speaks of his. Writing to the Christians in Rome he reminds them that they have not received a spirit of fear but the spirit of children, ‘and it makes us cry out "Abba, Father!" The Spirit himself and our spirit bear united witness that we are children of God’ (Romans 8:14-l6). Notice what he says: ‘the Spirit himself and our spirit bear united witness.’ That is, when God’s spirit tells us we are his children, our own spirit recognises the truth, there is an echo from our deepest self. This deep self accepts and is moved to ‘cry out, Abba, Father"’.

  Something like this was happening when Jesus looked around at the crowd and told them God loved them as children. That’s why they forgot about food to listen to him. They were hungry for this truth. When he told them they were children of the Father, that they were more beautiful than the flowers; when he told them that their Father loved them even as he loved Jesus himself; when he told them their sins were forgiven and their sickness was not sent by God as punishment, they knew they were hearing the truth and they were transformed.

  We live in his time. It is today. It is our time. We need not envy the first Christians. He is with us to the end of time as Friend and Saviour. He invited us to accept his friendship and salvation. He wants to speak his word to us today, the word of truth which can nourish and transform us. He would like us to talk to him, to share ourselves with him, to tell him the story of our life. And he would like us to listen to him and let him share himself with us and tell us his story, what it was like for him to live out a truly human life among us. As we listen he will share the secrets of his Father with us. He will lead us into the mystery and wonder of his Father’s being and into the mystery and wonder of our own being. He will lead us to the truth about God, about himself and about our own selves. This truth can touch the deepest part of us and release unexpected springs of life, growth and beauty. The wasteland within us can bloom again. Our dry hearts can become a beautiful garden for God where he will be pleased to walk, as he walked in the original garden of creation with the first man and woman.

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