All Hallows Eve begins the three-day observance of Allhallowtide, the time in the liturgical year dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints (hallows), martyrs, and all the faithful departed. It is widely believed that many Halloween traditions originated from ancient Celtic harvest festivals, particularly the Gaelic festival Samhain; that such festivals may have had pagan roots; and that Samhain itself was Christianized as Halloween by the early church. Some believe, however, that Halloween began solely as a Christian holiday, separate from ancient festivals like Samhain.

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. ¹⁵ (John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, “This is the one I spoke about when I said, ‘He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’”) ¹⁶ Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. ¹⁷ For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸ No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.” John 1:14-18

“We are…in a curious position when we try to place Jesus in his proper historical context. We know a very great deal about the short, final period of his life and hardly anything about the earlier period. Jesus himself wrote nothing, so far as we know. The sources we have for his public career—the four gospels in the New Testament—are dense, complex, and multilayered. They are works of art (of a sort) in their own right. But it is quite impossible to explain their very existence, let alone their detailed content, unless Jesus was himself not only a figure of real, solid history, but also pretty much the sort of person they make him out to  be. If he wasn’t….he’s not worth bothering with.” (“Getting Inside the Gospels”, Simply Jesus,  N. T. Wright, p. 7)

Jesus was probably born around 4 BCE, according to most biblical scholars. The people who invented the present system for dating our world got it almost right. He grew up in Nazareth in northern Palestine. His mother was related to a priestly line, and her son, Jesus, had a cousin named John. His mother’s husband, Joseph, was from the ancient royal family, the family of King David, of the tribe of Judah. So we know in the course of history when Jesus walked the earth. But Christians still believe that Jesus is alive in the present and that he will play a role in the future to which we are all heading. Still, he is the same, as one Christian writer so eloquently puts it: “yesterday, today and forever.” (Heb 13:8)

Therefore I ask the question, what is Jesus to you today and what will Jesus be to you tomorrow? Millions of Christians today call Jesus “Lord” – while millions or more tend to ignore him. Yet, Jesus pops up all over the place, no matter how much our world tries to deny him. Imagine, though, if Jesus had written something. Imagine if we had texts that Jesus not only spoke, but he himself penned. There are many personal and communal issues that would have benefited from some comment from Jesus – but we have no record of what Jesus thought of them – issues like sexuality — and his definition of the word “is”, like when he said “This is my body”. But that is another devotion for another time.

Perhaps one day we will find some letter purported to have been written by Jesus. Perhaps we will, one day, have a text that not only reports something Jesus said, but are authentic thoughts written by Jesus. Imagine. Thank goodness we do not need such a document trail to believe that Jesus was, is and will be the same to us “yesterday, today and forever.”

Pastor Dave