John 8:12-20

07/26/09
John 8:12-20
Hudson UMC

“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him is life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it…The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.”

Those were the words that opened John’s account of the life of Christ. In doing so, he prepared us, the readers, to think about God coming into the world as the man Jesus of Nazareth in terms of light entering into darkness. Light seems to lend itself intrinsically to be a poetic image of God. After all, light makes things visible, it makes things grow, it even warms us. For those of us who have Seasonal Affective Disorder, otherwise known as seasonal depression, light even plays a role in our emotional lives as well. Truly light is a powerful image.

Many of you have heard me say recently that modern natural science, especially Post-Einsteinian Physics, is more congenial to Christian faith than it has ever been. I want to share with you some of the insights that science has about light. Did you know that the speed of light in a vacuum like space, is exactly 299,792,458 meters per second? What is perhaps even more surprising is that scientists are convinced that the speed of light is the only truly consistent thing in the entire universe. All other phenomena appear differently to us depending on our point of view, but the speed of light is objectively constant. Scientists are becoming convinced that this one constancy of light might be the foundation on which all order in the natural universe depends.

Another thing that science tells us about light is that it is intrinsically invisible. If the windows in this sanctuary were clear and light were to come in one side of the church, travel straight through, without hitting anything, not even dust particles, and go out the other side, we would not be able to see it. We only can see light when it illuminates something else. We never really see or understand light in itself, but only as it interacts with the world around us.

These are fascinating and totally appropriate ideas when we turn to Jesus who, in this passage, tells us that He is the light of the world. Jesus is the incarnation of God in our midst. He is the foundation, the consistency, the reliable reality on which all of the created order rests. This faithfulness is the basis of our hope in the Lord. God once told the people of Israel, “I, the Lord, do not change; therefore you, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed.” The other point about the sheer invisibility of God is important to remember when we hear Jesus’ words. The Father is fundamentally invisible to us. Again, that first passage in John tells us, “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” God’s light has cast shadows on earth and we have perceived that there is a light when we read the words of the prophets, but we only see the light reflected fully in a way we can understand when the Son of God was born as a human being.

However, the fact that Jesus is the light of the world only has an impact on us if we perceive that we have a need for that light. Many people who have grown up at the very end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century live much of their lives indoors. Their computers are inside, their televisions are inside, nearly all the things they use to keep themselves busy or entertain them when they are bored are indoors. However, when the power goes out, as we all have seen happens when there is a severe thunderstorm, all of this changes. All the power that they trusted in has gone away. Before the power went out, there was no reason to leave the house. After all, it is often rather hot and humid during the summer and it is difficult to leave the air conditioning. Now, nothing works. They cannot even charge their laptop computers and their cellular telephones. I remember being in high school. When the power went out, all the students went outside.

The reason why I bring this up is that the people that I am speaking of do not realize that the light they enjoy inside their houses is artificial light and only an approximation of real light until they come to realize how dark their lives really are. The same is true for all human beings. If we are convinced that the human condition is bright and not dark, we will not turn to Jesus, the light of the world, because we content ourselves with the artificial and manmade light that is far short of the real thing.

In spite of the fact that much of modern Western culture would have us believe that human beings are basically good and have no intrinsic need for God, I think that this is nothing more than going inside the house and turning on all the lights and pretending that it is the same thing as the light of the sun. The fact of the matter is that the evidence of human sin is ever before us. Reinhold Niebuhr, the famous ethicist of the twentieth century, claimed that the only empirically verifiable doctrine of Christian faith, the only claim of the church that can be proved simply by looking at the world, is original sin. We can look to any part of history in any part of the world and see human beings who are fundamentally infected by sin. We can look in ancient times and see terrible tyrants and cultures, we can look to the middle ages and see the bloodthirsty general public who insisted on waging war on the Muslim powers simply because they had different understandings of God. Lest we think that we in the Western world have grown past this kind of attitude, let me remind you of the atrocities that were committed in Germany, in so many ways the headquarters of enlightened humanity that viewed people as basically good, in the first half of the twentieth century.

Indeed, even in recent history, we have all kinds of people who are sending bombs to others through the postal service, we have people who are entering public places and shooting random bystanders, and we have people who do hateful things in the name of the God of love. Even if we think that we in Hudson are totally removed from the infection of sin, a closer inspection shows that we, too, are every bit as fallen as others. We talk behind people’s backs, we spread rumors and gossip, we place ourselves and our desires above our neighbors. Even if none of the usual ways suburban and rural Americans fall into sin applies to us, I will put it another way. Last week, our passage was about Jesus showing mercy to the woman caught in adultery. Jesus’ words were, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Could any of us throw that stone? No, we couldn’t. Even if our fallenness looks different than the fallenness of others, we are still fallen and in need of the light of the world.

If we wanted to, we could try and come up with a bunch of arguments that say, “That might be true of the rest of humanity, but it isn’t true of me. I do all the right things, I go to church, I am polite to people. Surely I am not fallen,” but if we are honest with ourselves, I think we are all too aware of our sin and our shortcomings. We all have our problems. Admitting our sin might seem like an uncomfortable thing to do, it might seem like a way to destroy our self-esteem, but I assure you the opposite is true. Nothing makes us more depressed than thinking that all people are basically good. I say this because if this is what we really believe, how do we respond when we make a mistake, when we act in an evil way, when we are not as good as we should be? If this is the case, we will tend to think that we are somehow worse than everyone else because everybody else is basically good and we aren’t, and get depressed. If, on the other hand, we believe in our heart of hearts that all of humanity is tragically fallen, including ourselves, when we hear the good news of Jesus Christ, there is hope. Jesus, after all, said that He did not come for those who are well, but those who are sick. The word of the doctor is only welcome if we realize that we need it.

It is against the darkness of the human condition that I want to consider the words of Christ. “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” The first thing I want to bring to your attention is implied in the very fact that the man is saying this, this Jesus of Nazareth, who is God entering into our broken condition, who would soon lay His life down, not for people who were already good but for people who are fundamentally broken by the power of sin, tells us something amazing about our God. The fact that the Son of God, who is of one substance with the Father, who is in the Father and the Father is in Him, is telling us that He is the light of the world and that whoever follows Him will never walk in darkness but have the light of life, shows us that this light of the world is not afraid of our darkness. Our darkness cannot overcome it.

I sometimes wonder if this is something that we really understand in all its power. Many times, people in the history of the world have been fundamentally afraid of God, because they were so aware of the fact that they are unholy. They realize that they are not perfect which is never more clear than when they compare themselves to the perfection of God. People, even today, maybe even in this congregation, have believed that they have to get better, they have to become more holy before God will accept them. God can’t love them because they see themselves as so completely unlovable. And yet, just as the flagrant sin of the Samaritan woman did not stop Jesus from loving her to the uttermost; just like the disciples continued failure to grasp the reality of the work that God was doing in their midst did not stop God from calling them to be His witnesses to the ends of the earth; indeed, just like even the people who nailed Jesus to the cross were not so far gone that Jesus could not say, “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they do,” our darkness, deep though it may seem, is unable to overcome the light of the world, is unable to keep the love of God away, even from us.

I think it is important that we realize that this light of the world, which enlightens everyone, has come into the world. If Jesus, God in flesh, God with us, had not entered into our fallen and broken world, we might think that God loves us, even that God gives grace to us, but that God does not want to get too close to us because we might infect Him. By entering into our broken reality as the incarnate Son, taking up our hurts and anguish, suffering at the hands of people who hated Him for absolutely no real reason and endured the deepest sorrows that have ever been inflicted, God has shown us that He is big enough, that He is great enough, that He is powerful enough, to bear the weight of all that is wrong in this world. He has shown us that, even when all the sinfulness of the entire human race throughout all of history is gathered together, God can suffer all of it and still remain the God that loves us. Indeed, by willing rather to die on the cross rather than allow us to die in our sins, God shows us that He loves us even more than God loves Himself.

Now, when that light of the world shines in our darkness it can be a painful experience. Throughout the history of the church, Christian leaders have used very strong images to describe the broken condition of humanity, so I pray that you would forgive the intensity of the following image and perhaps even be challenged by it. Just as, when the lights go on, the cockroaches scatter because they hate the light, so there is a sense that we must endure the light of God. Our God is described as a consuming fire, which is painful imagery and painful it is, but we must always remember what that fire is consuming. It is not consuming who we really are, it is not destroying us, but rather making us more who we are and who we are meant to be. The consuming fire of God that is one and the same with the light of the world consumes in us all that is contrary to the perfect will and being of God. Indeed, if we believe that the Holy Spirit of God takes up residence inside our very selves, how could it not consume our sin and our selfish ways.

So, if the light of the world consumes our brokenness, our sin, our diseased nature and refines us as gold in the fire so that we are ever more like God and the love that God is, what have we lost? Even if the process is uncomfortable, have we not gained more than we have lost? We lose our sin but we gain the very presence of God in our hearts. We give up our selfishness and we gain ourselves, ever more fully realized as people who belong to God. Our hatred, our anger, our need to be right, our fighting, our striving, our idolatry, our envy, and all other things that fundamentally damage our relationships with others as well as with God are destroyed by that penetrating light of the world and in their place are left the fruit of the Spirit. We become people of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. I must admit that neither I nor we as the people of God live this way on a daily basis, but let us rejoice in the fact that it is precisely these kinds of people that God has called us to be and indeed it is precisely these kinds of people into which God promises to make us. If this is not good news, I do not know what is. In light of the wars, destruction and radical self-centeredness of our world around us, do we not find ourselves in intense need of precisely this kind of redemption and precisely this kind of God?

At the very end of the Bible, at the end of the book of Revelation, we read about the eschatological kingdom, the kingdom that God will set up at the end of all things. This kingdom is not the destruction of all that we see, a kind of universal destruction like what we read about in the story of Noah’s ark. It is not a reality where our souls are freed from the corruption of the flesh and exist alone, apart from the body. What we read about is a dramatic re-creation of the world, where God builds a new heaven and a new earth and the people of God will dwell in a New Jerusalem, a new city of God. These are the words we read. “And the city has no need of the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God has illumined it, and its lamp is the Lamb. The Nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it.

That light of the world who is the source of our light and love, is also the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. It is a light that is not just here to guide us on this side of eternity, but forever. We experience darkness now, but we will one day be brought into the kingdom in which there is no darkness. Let us give thanks and praise to the Lord our God who has given all good things to us. Let us pray.

AMEN