Alex Swain
Dear one,
Here are a loose collection of thoughts on a fragment of today’s Gospel reading!
You did not choose me but I chose you.
The Gospel according to St. John, the 16th verse of the 15th chapter.
You did not choose me but I chose you.
These are the words Christ declares to his disciples just after calling them his friends. His friends whom he loved to the end. Surely, I think, these are the words Christ speaks to each of us as well - both in the hectic frivolity of a work-filled morning, and in the boring afternoon quietude of a warm late-April eve.
You did not choose me but I chose you.
We his friends whom he has chosen.
Do you feel Christ, with the Father and the Advocate, knocking away at our hearts and mining its depths to make a home? For Christ has chosen you, and is certainly at work. We are told in yesterday’s Gospel reading that He and the Father will make a home in our hearts if we love Him and keep His word (John 14:23).
Perhaps your heart is heavy, laden with lead, and hard. Perhaps your heart is rubbed raw and aching from hardship and toil. Perhaps it is open, at peace and equanimous with the currents swirling about your life. Whichever state(s) you find yourself in, you yet remain chosen, and God is at work making a home in your heart.
You did not choose me but I chose you.
So Christ chooses us. This is grace at its finest, isn’t it? That we needn’t have had a transactional tit-for-tat with Love Incarnate to have been chosen. Rather it is that you are loved and cherished by God, and you are chosen, no ifs, ands, or buts to be had about it. This chosenness and cherished-ness is simply a state of reality, more real and permanent and irrevocable than a law of nature.
You did not choose me but I chose you.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke has a lovely poem, the first line titled Ich Bin, du Ängstlicher. Horst du mich nicht.
I am, you anxious one
Don’t you sense me, ready to break
Into being at your touch?
My murmurings surround you like shadowy wings.
Can’t you see me standing before you
Cloaked in stillness?
Hasn’t my longing ripened in you
From the beginning
As fruit ripens on a branch?
(The poem goes on for another stanza).
Christ, the Lord, has chosen you to love. So you are deeply and wonderfully and cosmically cherished, and in such tenderness we are granted the grace that we may love Love into eternity.
Do you sense Christ, then, ready to break into being at your touch? Do you hear His murmurings around you? Do you feel the desire of God to pour love out upon you?
Perhaps you do, or perhaps you don’t. Feelings are fleeting treasures, as it may be, but the hard fact is that first we have been chosen by Christ, and second, we are chosen by Christ, and third, we will be chosen by Christ!
May we lift our anxieties or worries or frenetic minds this day, therefore, as an offering laid at the feet of our risen Lord. Then, let us rest in knowing that before we could choose God, God Godself chose us.
Amen!
Alex Swain