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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