Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
This is a core statement of faith for Christians of many traditions, yet I confess I have stumbled over it plenty of times. As a youth, I imagined Jesus as a statue: unmovable, unchangeable, and timeless. For all of my book smarts and hot-headed ideologies, I apparently did not have the imagination to take this image any further than a Michelangelo-esque sculpture.
This, of course, is not what the statement means, thank God. It gets into the belief that the embodiment of Love that is God in Jesus Christ is one that we can experience fully inside and outside of time and history, that nothing we have done or could do will ever impact the grace of God or the promise of resurrection. This is good news! This is gospel! This is sound doctrine worth celebrating.
It is also a statement of hope—hope that even in the darkest of hours, Jesus Christ is still Lord, still Love, and still engaged in the saving work of the cross and empty tomb. And in the midst of the shakiness of our world over the past few years, months, and weeks, this is the hope we can cling to harder and harder still.
Our Campus Ministry theme this year is Ripple. We’ve been celebrating God's impact on us through the individuals whose actions have sent ripples throughout our lives. The most important ripple we’ve celebrated, time and again, is that of Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God.
Thanks be to God that the one who sent ripples throughout all of creation and history is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.