WORD 2day: Friday after the Christmas Octave
January 3, 2025 - 1 John 2:29 - 3:6; John 1: 29-34
Jesus is revealed today as the Spotless Lamb that takes away our sins. In this, God is revealed as the Righteous One and Sinless One. Anyone who lives in God does not sin, and anyone who sins has never seen or known God - says John in the first reading today. This is a direct and categorical declaration on God and those who belong to God. Hence when John declares Jesus as the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, we are given with not only a revelation of who Jesus is, but that of who God wants us to be - people who are chosen to belong to God, to be God's children.
To all who received him, he gave power to become children of God - yes, that is a special ability, a particular preparation, a deliberate choice - to become children of God. That is the role that the Lamb took upon itself to accomplish: to make us children of God. Two indispensable ways to move towards that goal: renounce sin and acknowledge God. That reminds us of the baptismal promise that we reconfirmed at our Confirmation ceremony: do you renounce satan and all his works and empty promises? And we said, I do.
Renouncing sin is renouncing the evil one - for sin comes from the evil one, those who are in God shall not go by sin. While converting oneself from sin and changing one's life, are essential elements of becoming God's own children, we cannot forget that these begin with the simple Step zero, of renouncing sin - calling it by name and judging it in face. This is the biggest of the crises of our times: the loss of sense of sin - the lost of the capacity to identify sin and call it as sin.
Acknowledging God becomes phony, if it is not preceded by a denouncement of the Satan and all the ways of the Satan... the dangerous trend that we see in the world today is allowing the two to co-exist. That is an absolute debilitation of truth, of faith and of anything that is transcendent. Jesus' person, his birth and his life choices, his death and the purpose attached to it, is a deliberate acknowledgement of God and a reminder of what such a life would be.
May the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, help us to take on with courage and hope the world of sin!
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