Jesus our breath of life
Every day human beings breathe out and breathe in thousands of times. Breathing keeps us alive. It’s unremarkable until we really start to think about it, usually only when something is physically wrong with us or with the air that we are breathing.
In a similar way, as a Christian you live and breathe the death and resurrection of Jesus. It’s as basic to your faith as breathing is to your body. You die and you rise, not as two separate acts, but as the one act of faith.
Right now, as you read this, you are breathing out and breathing in. Take a moment to concentrate on your breathing. It’s deep inside your body but it’s also outside of you, in the air that surrounds you. Breathing is a personal, intimate act of survival, but it also connects you with the world: we all breathe the same air.
Your faith is also like that – deeply interior and personal, yet inseparable from creation and the world in which you live. Believing in Jesus, trusting in him, dying with him, and receiving his new life into your very being is personal and intimate. Faith is within. We can’t always explain it. We often don’t think about it until something is wrong.
But faith is also outside us, like the air we breathe. It’s a gift for us to receive, and we all receive the same gift, from the same Saviour. He doesn’t play favourites but gives it to us all equally.
It takes many things – you are unaware of most of them – to work together just so your body can take a single breath of air. That air must have just the right mixture of gases for your body to live. Every breath is a new beginning, dependent on the grace of God, as you release the toxins that kill, and take on the gases that give life, especially oxygen.
…as a Christian you live and breathe the resurrection of Jesus. It’s as basic to your faith as breathing is to your body.
So faith, like air, is a gift, ready for you to receive. Many things in you, the world and heaven, come together to make it possible. However, the central ingredient that makes it possible for you to live is the dying and rising of Jesus Christ.
Our baptismal rebirth and renewal links us to that dying and rising. Romans 6:4 says, ‘When we were baptised, we died and were buried with Christ. We were baptised, so that we would live a new life, as Christ was raised to life by the glory of God the Father’. Martin Luther’s Small Catechism explains how this dying and rising is a daily experience.
You are probably reading this around Easter 2017. I encourage you to think of Easter not just as a once-a-year festival, but also as a daily dying and rising with Christ. Let it be as basic to you as the air you breathe. In dying with him, we let go of all that is wrong with the world and us, just as breathing out expels the toxins from our bodies. In rising with him, we receive his new life, untainted by sin or corruption, just as breathing in brings us fresh, life-giving oxygen.
So breathe out and breathe in. Do it again, and again, and again. Feel the rhythm of your breathing as it keeps you alive. Feel the rhythm of faith as you join Christ in his death and come alive again in his resurrection.
Every day is now a fresh start filled with boundless possibilities, because Jesus is alive and so are you.
