Growing up in a small community in southern India, where everyone it seemed knew everybody else, my identity was closely knit to those whose child I am. Being the only child of parents who were personages – my father, a vicar and my mother, a school teacher in what at that time was the only girls’ higher secondary school in town – I was known as the vicar’s li’l girl or as Mrs. Jerome’s daughter.
Having come from such a background, it is not very hard for me to imagine how it must have been for Jesus when he went visiting in Nazareth and folk dismissed him as being an ordinary-one-of-us (Mark 6:1-6) Christ was being defined by who his parents were – “Isn’t this Mary’s son?” – and also by what he did for a living - “Isn’t this the carpenter?” In the preoccupation of their knowledge of who his parents were and what he had accomplished professionally, their eyes were blinded and their sense dulled to the reality of who he was – not merely a wonder-worker, but the Son of God. Nazareth might not have known or acknowledged the Christ, but He knew who He was.
While I take great delight in being identified as my parents’ child and while I take pride in what I have accomplished and while I might even be pained by some elements of the past, it is absolutely vital that I grasp who I am on account of what Christ has done for me. I am a “sinner saved by grace.” I am a follower of Christ and I am entreated by the Master to live a life that would witness to the fact.
When folk try to conform you to what they know about you, may you have the strength to respond, “I am that but I am also beyond that.” May we allow God to define who we are in Him.
(Essay written from notes taken down one Sunday morning at church. The sermon was preached by the Rev. Charles Meyers at St. David’s Anglican Church, North Hollywood, California.)
Having come from such a background, it is not very hard for me to imagine how it must have been for Jesus when he went visiting in Nazareth and folk dismissed him as being an ordinary-one-of-us (Mark 6:1-6) Christ was being defined by who his parents were – “Isn’t this Mary’s son?” – and also by what he did for a living - “Isn’t this the carpenter?” In the preoccupation of their knowledge of who his parents were and what he had accomplished professionally, their eyes were blinded and their sense dulled to the reality of who he was – not merely a wonder-worker, but the Son of God. Nazareth might not have known or acknowledged the Christ, but He knew who He was.
While I take great delight in being identified as my parents’ child and while I take pride in what I have accomplished and while I might even be pained by some elements of the past, it is absolutely vital that I grasp who I am on account of what Christ has done for me. I am a “sinner saved by grace.” I am a follower of Christ and I am entreated by the Master to live a life that would witness to the fact.
When folk try to conform you to what they know about you, may you have the strength to respond, “I am that but I am also beyond that.” May we allow God to define who we are in Him.
(Essay written from notes taken down one Sunday morning at church. The sermon was preached by the Rev. Charles Meyers at St. David’s Anglican Church, North Hollywood, California.)
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