While It Is Day: Pondering “The Works of Him”

Jesus said, “We must work the works of Him who sent me, while it is day…” (John 9:4). This blog “While It Is Day” is my small attempt to do “the works of Him” who sent Jesus and who called out to me years ago, inviting me to live as best I could in His company.  What are these  “works?”  What are these works I am to do and these works I am to be, while it is day?  

Jesus suggested that we could not do the works of Him who sent Jesus without being connected to Him.  Jesus connected with His Father, the One who sent him, through prayer and urged us to pray also.  Jesus constantly reiterated the fact that what he was doing, what he was saying, and what he was being, was not his own doing, saying, or being, but that of Him who sent him.  “I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who sent me has himself commanded me what to say and how to speak…What the Father said to me, therefore—that is what I speak. (John 12:49-50).  Again in John 8:28, Jesus says, “I do nothing on my own, but in all that I say, I have been taught by my Father.  He who sent me is present with me, and has not left me alone; for I always do what is acceptable to Him.”  Since I am not Jesus I do not make the claim that “I always do what is acceptable to the Father,” but I do, by being in His company seek to share what the Father gives to me as best I can.  One of my oft-repeated prayers is the “Prayer of Rest” found in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer:  “O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our (Your) work is done.  Then by thy holy mercy grant us safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last. Amen.”

For now, while it is day, I must do and be all that the Father calls me to do and to be.  He calls me (all of us) to a party—the grace-party of life:  “Come to me all who labor and are heavy-laden.”  “I have come,” Jesus said, that  “you might have life and have it abundantly.”  Jesus’ Father and “Our" Father, calls me to be me—this is a big part of His work that I am to do and to be.  I am called to be me—me, as I am meant to be, not as I was, not as I am, not as I will be—but the me-in-the-making, right now,  the me that is “not yet” but moving right along.  

Jesus summed up the “works of Him who sent him” with two commandments that he rolled into one:  “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. It comes first.  The second is like it:  Love your neighbor as yourself.  Everything”…Jesus said, “hangs on these two commandments.”  These are the works of Him who sent Jesus and who has called us, too,  to do  His works, While It Is Day.