I Came So That They Might Have Life And Have It More Abundantly
by Deacon Bob's Blog
The word "life" gets used a lot in the Bible. The place where it appears most often is in John's Gospel, where it shows up a whopping 33 times. We see the word "life" at the very beginning of the Gospel, in John 1:4, where John speaks of Jesus and says: "In Him was life, and that life was the light of men." We see it towards the very end of John's Gospel as well, in John 20: 21, where John says that he has written down the story of Jesus so that we may believe that He is the Christ, the Son of God, and by believing we may "have life in His name." Today Jesus is quoted as telling the Pharisees that He has come so that the sheep (ie, His followers) "may have life and have it more abundantly." If you look at the various ways in which the word, "life," is used in John's Gospel, you can see that the word means different things in different contexts. Eternal "life" is obviously a different concept from life here in this world. So what is Jesus talking about today when He talks about His followers having "life and hav(ing) it more abundantly"? No, it isn't abundant life in the sense of having more of the things that we can accumulate. Nor is it more life in the sense of a longer number of years. I think Jesus has in mind that He came so that we can understand more fully what it is to be human, that we can have more of the life we were intended by God to have from the beginning, that we can be more the people we were intended to be. Jesus came that through Him and in Him we can have more "real life," more of the happiness and sadness that comes with being human, a deeper existence, more connection with the Divine and, ultimately, more joy. He came to teach us what it means to be human, not in an aspirational sense but in a sense that is real, and with God's grace, achievable. By His life and his dying, by what He said and what he did, Jesus came to be an example for us. And the beauty of it is that if we live as Jesus teaches and demonstrates, we will truly have "life" in its fullest. We will have a sense inside us that we are in the right place. We will know we are right with God and the world. Achievable? Yes. Easy? No. Requires that we open ourselves up to God's grace? For sure. But in the end, having life and having it more abundantly is what we are all built to desire. Jesus tells and shows us how to achieve that which we seek.