24 March 2017

Lent IV, 24 March 2017 – Light and darkness


Perhaps now it’s time to return to the discipline, on Friday mornings, of looking at the Gospel lesson for the next Sunday.  So now I report that the lectionary gives us, for Lent IV, John chapter 9, and that is the long, somewhat confused story of Jesus and the man born blind.  I have a hard time making head or tail of it.  For instance, right at the beginning, the disciples ask Jesus, Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?  If the man had been born blind, his blindness could scarcely have been caused by his sin, I would have thought.

But what does seem clear is that John, the gospel writer, has used this event, whatever actually happened, and somewhat embellished it, to portray Jesus as light in the darkness.  All I know, says the man, is that I was blind and now I see [9:25].  Let’s remind ourselves that what we are reading here was compiled and written at least one, more likely two generations after the events of Jesus’s life and ministry.  These writings reflect the experience of Christian believers who are the adult children or grand-children of Jesus’s contemporaries– and so, by now, they have a store of wisdom about the realities of following Jesus.  One of the ways they see him is as light in the darkness.  The man born blind can now see.  He can’t explain it, he cheekily tells the pharisees, but he now knows the difference between darkness and light, even if they don’t.

In the year 2017 it might be easier if we were that assured.  People who live in darkness, or at least in murky twilight, typically don’t know it, and certainly don’t appreciate it being implied.  But if you maintain a list of enemies and threats, people you have to be on guard against… if you have to build protective walls around you… that is scarcely living in the light.  If we are living in unforgiveness… if we have turned ourselves into chronic victims of someone or some event… if our lives were changed by something someone did, and we are unable to let it go… if we are determined never to put aside something they said… we are at least in the shadows.  And I would say, if we need to seek happiness in drugs or alcohol, partying and promiscuity, speed or fleeting fame… it seems somewhat dim and gloomy.

The choice between light and darkness is very prominent in the Christian scriptures, and never more than in the writings of John.  These people experienced Jesus as light, bringing light – and then they can see the darkness to which they could return.  It is always a choice.  Right at the beginning of John’s Gospel:  In him was life, and the life was the light of all… and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never overcome it [1:4-5].  Later Jesus is depicted as saying: I am the light of the world; whoever follows me will not walk in darkness [8:12].   In the Sermon on the Mount he says enigmatically: If the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness! [Matthew 6:23] -- which reminds me, at any rate, of how the church itself, in various ways, can shed darkness rather than light – and rather too often has.  St Paul too is very strong on this theme.  God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, he writes, has shone in our hearts… [II Cor 4:6].  We are not of the night, nor of darkness, he wrote to the Thessalonian church [I Thess 5:5]. 

There appears to have been an ancient hymn, of which Paul quotes a fragment in Ephesians:  Awake, sleeper! Arise from the dead!  Christ will give you light! [Eph 5:14].   Each new day the choice is renewed, each time we are faced with complex decisions about what to do, or say… each time there is a choice between truth and half-truth… each time we return to prayer.  We choose the light.

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