This year, Live Out the Values Jesus Taught You
The Universe
(January 04, 2004)
We face the New Year ahead, we see another Christmas behind - are we any the wiser about the past and more prepared to live the future?
The birth of Jesus of Nazareth ought to be a reflection of the values he lived and died for so we can live them out in the coming months. It is a time to bring the values he lived and died for into our thoughts and behaviour. It is a time to bring together family and friends, renew vows, strengthen bonds and redirect our lives.
On the basis of the bare historical record alone, Jesus of Nazareth, born under poor and humble circumstances, was a child of no consequence to most.
He did not come from an influential or powerful family. He did not lead a revolution, a movement of national liberation or even found a religion. Others who came after him did those things in his name, but none have been remembered as much as this simple carpenter from a small obscure town in Palestine.
Yet he was hardly a week in the world that first Christmas before Herod made him a refugee and an asylum seeker. He was threatened, driven with his parents into exile, barely escaping the bloody massacre of the innocent children. Were he and his parents to come knocking on our doors or immigration offices today, would they be turned away or imprisoned.
He was a threat to the status quo and was a true champion of the poor, saying they were God's children, they were equal before God and emerged from God's own image. Yet people of religion, power and wealth despised them. When we see the images of the starving of Africa, we know his message has been ignored, his example spurned and we are challenged as never before.
He makes clear the path to peace. Retaliation and revenge must give way to unconditional forgiveness and reconciliation, violence and coercion has to be replaced by non-violence and peacemaking, pride and jealousy are to be abandoned in favour of humility and selflessness.
It was and is a revolutionary message. It turned the pious hypocrites inside out. It told the forgotten that they were remembered and the downtrodden that they would walk with God. Those rejected are welcomed, those despised are praised, the abused are treasured, and the wounded are healed.
What is so enduring about Jesus and so challenging to each one of us today is that his invitation to friendship is a living reality, that we can know when we accept it. That acceptance brings us into his living presence.
There, embracing the changeless values he taught, we can find the strength to live them out and the courage to face the consequence of our convictions for the New Year ahead.
