Amy and Eternal Life
Eternal Life
And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. (John 17:3)
Have you ever wondered what eternal life is – what it is, when it is, what it feels like? Who gets in and who doesn’t, and do you ever wonder if you will get in?
Is eternal life available only to some of us and not all of us?
Is eternal life – as one critical and disingenuous account of it goes – “pie in the sky when you die?”
In this view, eternal life is all about what happens later. Then. When our earthly life ends.
In this view, it can seem like it doesn’t really matter how you and I live now, what our day-to-day lives are like now, what injustice or suffering we may experience here on earth now. No matter how bad it gets here, this view holds, it will all be better later, the bad guys will be punished, God will sort it all out when this life is over – it’ll all come out right in the end.
Of course, it does all come out right in the end.
But I think Jesus in his prayer for his disciples and for us today is suggesting something in addition to that.
Jesus suggests that eternal life is available to us not in the end, or, at least, not only in the end, but right now, in the here and now, in each moment of our lives.
And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. (John 17:3)
Knowing God, that is, being in relationship with God – in prayer, in acts of love and justice, in giving and sharing, in care and concern for creation – is in some real sense living in eternal life right now.
And this eternal life is available to each of us, at every moment of our lives, on earth as it is in heaven.
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