Last night at our house we were watching TV. But this was not old-school, corner-of-the-sitting-room, collective TV. Oh no. This was modern, hand-selected TV, bespoke TV, individually curated for a unique, personal experience.
In other words, Susie and I were both tired and both watching catch-up. I was watching the one with the Irish teacher and the American ad guy who start a family. It’s very funny. And Susie was watching the one where nearly everyone gets a virus and turns into a zombie, which isn’t funny at all.
The thing about both programmes though, is the extent to which they depend on choice. In the funny show, two people choose each other for fun and end up choosing each other for life. In the zombie show, all the people who aren’t zombies, when they’re not killing zombies, are endlessly having to choose who to trust, who to share with, who to love.
Now, people have a huge capacity to love but, no matter how great, there’s only so far we can be stretched, so we all make choices about who we love. And because of that, we all know how special it feels to be chosen, not in a picking-sides-for-football way, but in a way that makes us know we are truly wanted and needed.
The Bible tells us that God wants and needs people for all sorts of things, and he chooses and calls them to be judges and prophets, parents and rulers. But Christians believe that what all those individual choices reflect is not that God has favourites but that he’s interested in the whole world.
St John’s Gospel repeats the idea again and again: God gives light to the world, he gives life to the world, he forgives the world, he saves the world. He loves the world.
In other words, God chooses us. All of us. God chooses to love the whole world and everyone in it – black, white, female, male, gay, straight, old, young. Everyone.
We are all loved. We are all chosen to be loved. And I reckon that in a world where the limit of my weary Tuesday night ambition is to get to choose my own TV, that’s a pretty amazing thought for a Wednesday morning.
The image is a detail from the Apostles Corporal, an Egyptian liturgical cloth of the 6th century CE, reputedly given to Pope Gregory the Great.