This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in God there is no darkness at all. (I John 1:5)
This is the message we have heard from him… that is to say, from Jesus. John is recalling his church, perhaps at Ephesus, to first principles, to the basics. Lay aside what you may have learned in earlier impressionable times about God – these things are not sacrosanct -- or what you may have derived from the ways people talk. In grown-up faith and practice we are humble and teachable about faith, and we are open to change, the more so as the years go by. We are learning to discern truth, which may be very different from “what we always believed”, or “what I always thought”... It is Jesus, the teacher within, (St Paul calls him the icon of the invisible God)[1] who says, God is light, and in God there is no darkness at all.
It is Jesus who teaches and shows what the Jewish scriptures at their best were always straining to say, that God is the author of love and mercy, creativity and invention, today and tomorrow, oldness and newness, repentance and forgiveness, healing and restoration, truth and justice… God is not the author or promotor of fear and hatred, suspicion and superstition, division and prejudice, power and superiority or violence against others or against the environment… God does not punish; God does not take our side against others. So there is much popular “faith”, so called, which belongs more properly to the realm of darkness. God is light and in God there is no darkness at all.
And here, it may be, is the resolution of our dilemma… simply that we are not living in heaven where all is light. The seer in the Book of Revelation sings about the heavenly Jerusalem: And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light…[2] But we are living here. Darkness remains a familiar friend... or at any rate, the twilights of doubt, compromise, impasse, to say nothing of loss and sorrow. We do need… and we continue to need… to know how to see in the dark we encounter. This night vision is called discernment, even if sometimes in our lives it may seem slighter than lighting a candle. The signs of discernment may well start with something as prosaic as our refusal to be drawn into the politics of strife, or power, or the familiar manifestations of confusion, prejudice, hate and fear. We find we are preferring the light. In Benedict’s luminous phrase, we prefer nothing whatever to Christ.[3]
So there are two imperatives for grown-up faith. One is that we learn how to see in the dark, how to be still and listen, how (in the biblical phrase) to let our words be few, how to see what we may miss in our busyness and noise, how to discern, and perhaps even at times to be wise. The other is always remembering, learning, loving and following the way of Jesus, whom to follow is not to walk in darkness… the Risen Jesus, “sight unseen”, whom his earliest followers understood would be with them to the end of the world.
[1]
Colossians 1:15… “Image” in Greek is eikōn (εוκων)
[2]
Revelation 22:5
[3]
Rule of St Benedict, 72:11 – Christo
omnino nihil praeponant
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