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CHRIST THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD
by Fr. John-Mark We have to start our journey today in the Book of Genesis. Unfortunately, that book is not liked by the skeptics of our time and it sometimes seems to generate more heat than light. This is because it is so often treated as if it were a text book of natural physics, when a better description is a poetical description of Genesis, that is of The Beginnings of our Existence. It starts off "In the beginning, God created…." what appears to have been a water-logged void. Then, two verses later, we are told, God made His second act of Creation when He said:- "Let there be light." Obviously, that was necessary in order to promote life as we know it, but strangely, as the story of Salvation History develops, "Light" becomes a way of describing God and his activity among men. We are told about God appearing in a Burning Bush; of His guiding the Israelites as a pillar of fire and cloud by night. And eventually, this idea of God being equated with light is taken up in the so-called Prologue to St John’s Gospel. There, God’s Son, Jesus, is described as "the Word of God" and we are also told that "In Him was life, and the life was the light of men." This was the light which Moses saw in the Burning Bush (Exodus.3.2) and also which Isaiah saw it in his famous vision of heaven (Isaiah 6.1-5) and later still, the three disciples experienced on the Mount when Our Lord was Transfigured (Matthew 17.2). In some mysterious way then, the existence of God seems bound up with this whole idea of "light". The opposite of light, the enemy of light, is darkness, and St John declares that "the light (of God) shines in the darkness, and the darkness comprehends it not"(1.5). In that one verse we have an outline picture of the struggle portrayed in the Gospel between the forces of Satan / Evil / darkness, and the Power of God. Interesting to note that St. John says that the darkness does not comprehend the opposition. In other words, darkness can oppose the light but it cannot defeat it, and this is important. Another interesting aspect of St. John’s Prologue is that, writing late in the first century, he assumes that his readers will know of the Birth of Jesus, Son and Word of God, from the earlier Gospels, and so he confines himself to pointing out the implications of that Birth for Mankind. The Jewish scriptures tell us that their religious leaders and writers were aware of the workings of God inside the nation of Israel, but just how much this belief spilled over into the lives of ordinary people is not clear. What St John claims in his Prologue is that "the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth"(13/4). A breath-taking sentence by any account, and its implications are to some extent, worked out in the rest of the Gospel, and then in the subsequent tradition of the Church. What is important for St John and for us, is that the Coming of Christ into the world re-assures the people of the world, whether they are baptized Christians or not, that God is concerned with the everyday proceedings of this world. No other faith, so far as I am aware, presents such a mind-breaking tenet of belief for its disciples to equal the assertion that Jesus the Son of God became flesh and dwelt among us. Because we claim that Christ is unique in this all-important way, are we being challenged today by other faiths world-wide, and there is no doubt that we shall have a hard fight ahead in order to maintain the tradition of the Orthodox Church on this basic issue. We are reassured by St. John’s claim that darkness cannot overcome the Light. The Gospels and the tradition of the Church provide plenty of evidence for the assertion that Jesus is the Light of the world. The gospel account of Our Lord's stilling of the storm on the lake always seems to me to be important as recording the disciples first realization of the power of Jesus. St Mark reports "they said to one another:- 'who can this be, that the wind and the sea obey Him?'" Next, the second Gospel goes on to show how Jesus had authority to free a man possessed by demons, and St Mark says briefly: "they all marvelled." But he proceeds in the next section to describe two even greater acts showing the "authority" of Jesus – by healing a woman who had suffered with an issue of blood for18 years and did not ask for healing; and finally he describes Jesus' power over death itself by restoring to life Jairus’ twelve-year-old daughter. St Mark laconically remarks "they were overcome with great amazement. But Jesus commanded them strictly that no one should know it, and said that she should be given something to eat" (5.43) The Word made Flesh knew that twelve-year-old girls are always ravenous. Another way in which the Light of the World proclaimed His true nature is by His clever acts of denial. Frequently, the rulers of the Jews tried to trap Him into claiming to be the Messiah, but each time He skilfully turned their question back on themselves. They asked: "By what authority do you do these things?" Jesus agreed to tell them if they would first answer Him one question. "The Baptism of John: was it from heaven or from men?" He asked and, of course, the chief priests dare not answer for fear of their own faithful, so they said they didn’t know. But notice Jesus’ careful response "Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things" (Mark.11.33), strongly hinting that His authority came, like John’s baptism, from heaven. It is fair to say that Jesus hid His authority so well, that when He was finally brought to trial there was no firm evidence against Him and He had to provide it for them. Claiming to be the Messiah was blasphemy for the Jews and a crime deserving death, but they knew it would not convince Pilate, so they accuse Jesus of a political charge:- that He claims to be a King and therefore a threat to Roman rule. Pilate is amused by this and asks Jesus "You are a King then?" The New Testament gives us Jesus’ reply in laconic Greek – "you’ve said it" – and this agreement, coupled with the threat of a riot, was enough to encourage Pilate into signing the death sentence. The Light of the World had voluntarily condemned Himself to die the death common to humanity. Had that been the end of the story of Jesus, we would never have heard of Him but as St John says, the darkness could not overcome Him and as He promised, after three days in the Tomb, he rose from the dead and the rest, in one sense, is history. To say that He is the Light of the World is one thing, but how do we answer people’s question:- where does He shine? is another. Perhaps the best icon of this subject is the painting by Holman Hunt called "The Light of the World". This shows Our Lord, simply dressed but wearing a crown of thorns, standing outside a big, oak door which is wildly overgrown with weeds and brambles, and which, very significantly, has neither a door-handle nor knocker visible. In His left hand, Jesus holds a lighted lantern and His right hand seems to be knocking on the door. By all this, Hunt meant to represent Jesus knocking at the door of our heart which is overgrown with neglect and cares of this world, and from that he makes two further points. First, that the door of our heart can only be opened from the inside. And second, that the Light of the World has to be invited by us, into the place where He really belongs, and that is, our heart. It is easy to rubbish the painting as sentimental etc but it conveys exactly the same message as that put out by many of the Fathers of the Church, who followed so closely the teaching of Our Lord in the Gospel. This almost began with the statement "Blessed are the pure in heart." (Matthew 5.8) and He assured His hearers that "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." (Matthew 6.21) What greater treasure can there be, but Him? He condemned the hypocrites simply because their heart was far from Him (Matthew 15.8) and when challenged to pronounce on which is the greatest commandment, He at once says "love the Lord your God with all your heart." (Mark12.30). St Luke tells graphically of his journey with Cleopas on the afternoon of the first Easter Day when Jesus joined them and gave them an exposition of how the all Old Testament pointed forward to Himself. After breaking the bread, Jesus disappears and the disciples say "Did not our hearts burn within us when He talked to us on the road?" (Luke.24.32). It is this "burning" within the heart that the Fathers refer to so often as a sign of the presence of the Light of the World, burning/shining in our hearts. And it is this that the Fathers so frequently urge on us to strive to acquire, that is, a meeting in the heart between ourselves and our God. St Theophan the Recluse puts it like this:-- You seek the Lord? Seek, but only within yourself. He is not far from anyone. The Lord is near all those who truly call upon Him. Find a place in your heart, and speak there with the Lord. It is the Lord’s reception room. Everyone who meets the Lord, meets Him there. He has fixed no other place for meeting souls. ("The Art of Prayer" page 104) We may be assured that the Light can shine, even in what we may consider is the darkness of our hearts. The miracle of the Christian life for each one of us is that, as the Son of God became man and dwelt among us , so we, in turn, may become, as St Peter says, "a partaker of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). |
