Facebook founder and billionaire Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla were in the news recently when they made a pledge to their new-born daughter Max that they would devote more than 90 per cent of their huge wealth – some $45 billion – to the advancement of humankind and the promotion of equality, with a particular focus on education and health.
In a promise to the child, they said: “Today your mother and I are committed to spend our lives doing our small part to help solve these challenges . . . these issues are too important to wait until you or we are older to begin this work.”
They want not only their child to grow up in a better place but other children too. It is an encouraging story at the start of a new year, a commitment to help remake a troubled world. It allows us to hope that 2016 will be a new year in real terms for some at least.
In her book A Journey to God, Delia Smith takes a fresh look at the opening verses of St John's Gospel which are part of tomorrow's liturgy.
“One reading of St John’s famous prologue is that, in the life of Jesus, the Word started to become flesh and that it will take a whole world responding to him to complete the incarnation. Some hope, one might say, looking at a world torn and twisted, largely deaf to Jesus’s message from God, of the love that can fill the emptiness and eventually unite creation. And yet we are occasionally granted the faintest glimpses of what the incarnation ultimately means.
“One of the most tangible visions, if you like, of hope for the future struck me on the day of the Live Aid concert in 1985.With the God-given gift of high technology and satellite television, it was suddenly possible to have a perception of the world as a community of love (not least among the young). For one day nations were united in the fight against famine.
“It wasn’t the money raised that was so impressive but the few precious moments of universal communion in one common purpose, with no motivation other than goodness and generosity. There were tears for a suffering world, yes, but also joy and celebration in sharing a hope for the future.
Global village
“When the incarnation, like leaven in the dough, has worked its way all through the human race, the global village or world community will no longer be a dream but a reality. When love reigns, there will be no more famine, ‘no more mourning, no more sadness’. The world of the past has gone. Revelation 21:4.”
The biblical writers encourage us to see that God’s business is making things new. The Book of Revelation is quite explicit: ‘Behold, I make all things new’.
For Christians, the life of Jesus is the ultimate representation of God’s newness in the world revealing to us the potential for good of humanity. It is important to recognise the source of this newness. It is God-given; it depends wholly on God.
It is beyond our best human efforts and that troubles modern man who, despite all the evidence to the contrary, likes to think he or she is in control. The Bible is concerned with the community that receives, trusts in and embraces the miracle of newness. It shows that this community, synagogue and church, is summoned in a radical way of obedience in the world.