Grace upon Grace

Grace upon Grace – Today’s scripture is the first eighteen verses of the Fourth Gospel, familiar as, “In the beginning was the word, . . .” This week was the return to earth of Artemis 2 with the four astronauts who circled the moon, and our bulletin cover has an image of the earth taken from that flight. It is a cosmic perspective of humankind, much as the perspective of the first image in John wherein love was there in the beginning. From that universal perspective of love, the gospel zooms to humanity in the form of Jesus. Nobody has actually seen God except through Jesus, and the gospel records many acts of Jesus that reveal grace and love through God, and in the next weeks we will explore those illustrations in the Fourth Gospel. Much as one of the astronauts on the Artemis mission commented on the experience of the love of God and of each other on that mission, the writer of the Fourth Gospel experienced the love of God and expressed that.