The first anything is exciting: the first date, the first big move, the first time you try to shoot a spider off the refrigerator with your first bee-bee gun. The genesis of any thought, as cloudy as it may be, comes loaded with excitement and energy foreign often to the rest of life. I sat with a friend today and we shared some time exploring art and concept and how things move from idea to reality for us individuality. I was exciting. I shared a bit about an idea I have had for a while and expressed the desire to put flesh on the thing. The thing is, desire is only the canvas of creation. Words, stokes and concrete actions is what causes a genesis to happen. For something to begin, in my life thus far, risk has to happen-I have to, in the words of friends and mentors, ‘go for it’. So when do you go and when do you forfeit potential, count your losses and move on? That’s a good question, and one I respect and don’t expect to think through now. Maybe later…well, lets just say I think there might be potential in loss. In fact maybe that is how life works most the time? It might look like this.
On the first day of the week Jesus rises from the dead and John points this out to clearly say with surprise to the Jewish mind that the great resurrection has begun. A new genesis is under way and Jesus started it. He took the actions entering into the drama of the human plight and was the ‘light that separated the darkness’ once again. Jesus is the firstfruit of the new creation and set his followers on a path to be just that for the world. Kind of like when God began the first time and invited us into the project to: rule, create and name. We were to bear his image through our activity in his world. To rule is the first of the 613 first testament laws. Maybe better is to care and cultivate the gardens that make up the world. God is interested in the whole thing from the beginning and you get the sense that there is all sorts of energy, creativity and excitement from the first words being spoken to the final stroke of humans being brought into existence on the sixth day.
The Jesus movement confronts loss and lives that have crashed into darkness into the primeval chaos and into the hells of this world. It is Gods way of seeing potential where there might not be. The Jesus movement is a first of its kind, because ‘love is the movement and the only revolution in history’. I heard someone say that once and it shook me to the bones. It is no wonder then that Jesus’ brother said this about the whole thing:
he chose to give us a beginning through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.
In loss there is potential which might be why Jesus said things like his was here to ‘seek and heal the lost’. If I am honest I experience the weight of loss in ways that are really painful. Friends, family, comfort and innocence are taken while at the same time we sense the desperate crawl of our whole selves in a dimly lit world, we know lostness. But this thing Jesus jump started is his eternal work, it is what he is about. It invites us to not just be found but to begin. To begin yet again a new first. To see our days as firsts that care for and cultivate the life of heaven with every word and stroke.
