From the beginning to the end of his letter, John really wants one thing: for us to be in Jesus.

Hope is found precisely while we’re dead.

When I was a boy, I wanted to be a trashman. Little did I know that I would grow up to need a God who was a trashman.

This rather unique human being is God grounded in our humanity. The man Jesus.

You matter so much to God that he would rather die than lose you. You matter so much to Jesus that no suffering was too much, no deprivation too burdensome, no punishment too severe for him to endure to have you as his own.

We who fall within the Protestant camp of Christianity have longstanding issues with ritual. I get that. Ritual is often abused. Idolatrized. It can easily devolve into a hollow act of religious farce.

Imagine if Zacchaeus posted on Jerusalem's Facebook a selfie with Jesus. The top dog among the tax-gougers with Christ at his dinner table. Oh, the outrage! The puritanical zealots would have been tweeting and blogging about it for months.

He came to be for every man what no man has been or could be for himself. Born under the law, Jesus fulfilled the law He Himself had given. He was the perfect infant, perfect teenager, perfect adult.

But in that quest for thou shalts and thou shalt nots, you’ll miss what really matters. You’ll trample the cross while racing for the tablets of stone. From the tale of Achan's theft, you’ll rob yourself of Jesus.

Scattered throughout all denominations are moms and dads whose greatest disappointment in life is that their children have seemingly abandoned the faith.

Strange though it be, however, it is marvelous in meaning: for this was his way of writing his covenant into the very flesh of his people. What was not there, was a sign of what was there.