The Key: From Above

WORD 2day: Tuesday, 2nd week in Easter time

April 13, 2021: Acts 4: 32-37; John 3: 7b-15

The first Christian Community gives us a challenging example today, a prophetic witness! Just imagine that to be the state of our parish communities, or our basic christian communities...or even the Religious Communities of Consecrated life... can this model be emulated today? It is easy to brush it aside, calling it an outdated model, or an impractical ideal, or an utopian imagination, or a time proven failure! Call whatever you may, the challenge remains.

Along with the challenge there is also a doubt that lingers on: could they have really lived that way! Really! Sometimes youngsters dare ask that question aloud too, when we have sessions or seminars! Isn't it an exaggeration, a kind of figure of speech that hightens the reality for the sake of creating the appeal that is intended? The answer is, a categorical NO. They lived that way! The records are true and the records are not only in the Bible...they were also historical communities which caused the many a eyebrow raise! 

Jesus provides us with the key to the challenge, that is the secret which helped them live that way: it is, to live your life as if from above. We have received our life and everything in life as a gift from above. And when it is time for us to report back from where we come, we will go without anything in our hands. When we see things from above then, we would laugh at our folly as does the Lord now from heaven (see Ps 2:4). 

This was the fact...the early Christian community saw Jesus live and come back to life and go back to his Father...they expected him to come back shortly...even while they were still living. That is why they were prepared at anytime to report to the Lord...this gives us the clue how they managed to live such a detached life. Though it seems a reduction of their high noble ideals, the fact is clear: they were living a life from above!

Just look at your life, as you live it today, just from a little above! You will understand how foolish we can be... with our attachments and avarice, jealousy and treachery, ego and selfishness, and every other inhumanity for the sake of things that do not matter at all! Have we not totally lost the real sense of our lives? 

Let us remember the key given to us by Christ: live your life as from above. Learn to look at life from above and you will have a clear picture of what is important and what not!