Bearing Witness

Here’s how Rowan Williams puts it: 

“You have an identity, not because you have invented one, or because you have a little hard core of selfhood that is unchanged, but because you have a witness of who you are. What you don’t understand or see, the bits of yourself you can’t pull together in a convincing story, are all held together in a single gaze of love. You don’t have to work out and finalize who you are, and have been; you don’t have to settle the absolute truth of your history or story. In the eyes of the presence that never goes away, all that you have been and are is still present and real; it is held together in that unifying gaze.”

All these different parts of us are held together in that single gaze of love because Jesus himself bears witness to our lives. So we do not have to invent our identity. We do not have to preserve it or defend it. We do not even have to understand it.

Augustine writes in his Confessions that “God is more intimate to me than my own thoughts.” That mystery—that Jesus knows us better than we know ourselves, has seen every part of us, past, present, even future—frees us from needing to assert our identities, frees us from needing to preserve them, frees us from any need to prove ourselves.

So if you are feeling overlooked, or taken advantage of, or misunderstood, or insignificant, then the invitation for you is to imagine, to remember, that Jesus himself notices you and he could not be more delighted. There is nothing you need to prove, he cannot love you any more than he already does. He has gone to great lengths to show this to us—becoming human just like us in order to be overlooked and misunderstood and absolutely secure in the love of God. His identity does not come from himself, it is sourced in the never-ending creativity of God’s love.

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From a sermon on John 5:30–47.