Friday 10 January 2025
1 John 5:5-13. Praise the Lord, Jerusalem – Psalm 147:12-15, 19-20. Luke 5:12-16.
Act of love
Normally if someone spoke of overcoming the world, they’d be imagining some sort of ‘James-Bond-villain’ exercise in domination, a fantasy of oppression and triumph. Here though, John asks who has done it, and gives the response, ‘The one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God’. That is who has ‘overcome’ the world.
When he says that the Spirit, the water and the blood ‘bear witness’, he is saying that the Spirit testified to Jesus as the Son of God at his baptism, and through his Resurrection after his death on the cross. And the Spirit is ‘truth’.
Really believing in the true nature of Jesus does not come easily; it requires personal assent, but arriving at that assent requires the prompting of the Spirit to accept the truth. Meanwhile, the Truth in today’s Gospel is found in an act of love: this Jesus, this almighty Son of God, touches a leper.
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