Today we not only commemorate St Thomas the Apostle but also this year St John the Theologian and Evangelist whose feast it is today as well.

This verse was heard in the gospel reading:

And there are also many other things that Jesus did, which if they were written one by one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. Amen.  (John 21:25)

It is good to be reminded that the Gospels of the New Testament are an edited selection of the words and works of Christ. St John and the other three Evangelists chose their material carefully under the guidance of the Holy Spirit with just one objective in mind. This is made clear in the following verses from chapter 20:

… truly Jesus did many other signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name. (John 20:30-31)

This tells us that when we read the Scriptures we are always challenged toward faith and life in Christ, the risen Lord. The New Testament is not an encyclopaedia of interesting Christian facts; it is a document of faith written for faith. This is the approach that St John uses in the rest of the gospel that precedes the accounts of Christ’s resurrection appearances to his friends. He chooses certain key events in the life and ministry of Christ and shows how they all point forward for their fulfilment to the death and resurrection of Christ. This is true whether one considers the miracle at Cana in Galilee in chapter 2 where it is said that His hour is not yet come; the “hour” of course being the hour of his passion. It is true in the next chapter when Jesus challenges Nicodemus to new birth in the Spirit. The Spirit will not come of course until Christ is glorified and then ascends to the Father. It is true in chapter 4 when our Lord meets St Photini, the Samaritan woman, at the well. The living water that will well up inside her can only gush forth when she has a new heart, a new spirit and a new life. Again the death and resurrection of Christ precisely makes that new birth in baptism possible for her.  I will not multiply the examples. Suffice to say that for St John and for the other evangelists everything that Jesus does and says has one direction and goal: to reconcile people to God and to create within them a new heart for the empowerment of the coming Holy Spirit.  It is about the divine transformation of persons in community and the whole world by His love.

Unless we are careful and vigilant in our Christian lives we can forget these foundational Christian truths that have forged both our identity in Christ and the newness of life that comes from Him. Happily, at Pascha each year, we stare into our own empty tomb and remember that Christ is not to be found among the dead, either in his empty tomb or ours. Actually we can do that every Sunday because each Lord’s day is a little Easter. The life of the risen Christ is ever new. That newness longs to break into our lives all the time. It is the new wine of which Christ speaks and which needs new wine skins or else the wine will be lost (Mark 2:22).  Our part in this is to make sure that we have new skins for the infilling of the new wine. The old skins are rotting in the ground; the new skins are imperishable and eternal, the only fit containers for the life of the living God.

When we look at the life and witness of St John beyond the pages of the New Testament, we see a missionary who has new relationships in Christ, a new mother in fact in the person of the ever Virgin Mary whose care becomes his responsibility after the passion. St John and the Mother of God are often associated together in the city of Ephesus in the historical remembrance of the Church. Other witnesses, not inconsistently, recall that later St John went into exile as an old man on the island of Patmos in the Aegean. Here he wrote the Book of the Revelation in a cave retreat that bears his name and is his shrine to this day. It is furthermore recorded that his dying words were quoted directly from his first letter, chapter 4 and verse 8: “God is love.” St John never lost the freshness of his rebirth in Christ. His infectious love for our Lord inspired the long service of the Hieromartyr Polycarp in Smyrna (Izmir today in Turkey) and beyond Polycarp to his friend, the Greek St Irenaeus who ended up as a bishop in Gaul in the West.

Such life changing consequences with all their global ramifications follow on as day follows night with every single believer who meets, knows and is forever changed by his or her encounter with the risen Christ. That is precisely what can happen here and now in this church with you and I, but we have to be prepared to repent, to lay aside our old familiar life and embrace the new with all its uncertainties and yet exciting possibilities. This is the life of faith, not the life of easy comfort. The gate is narrow to salvation and those who find it are few (Matthew 7:13-14).

We should take care therefore every day to do a spiritual health check; to make sure that we are consciously living in the new life that Christ gives us out of his generosity and love. We must never settle for second best, for coasting along, for staying in our comfort zones. The life of faith, the life that St John and the other apostles lived was always open-ended, always ready to be surprised by what God might be prepared to do: surprising things, unheard-of things, unexpected things. I don’t know about you but this is life in abundance, this is life as it should be lived—without limit, in and through the love of God made manifest to us in the God man Jesus Christ. In Him we have fullness of life and life eternal. In Him there is life for us and for the world if we would but go out and share it; as in fact St John did. Let us become worthy of his memory in our witness to Christ.