The Light of the World

“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away,” I was a youth leader at a church.  I wanted to take the youth on an inexpensive retreat and so we decided to go to Gemm Lake.  Gemm was the name given to a lake in central Ontario by ten families in the church who all had cottages around it.  The young people were in their element, they were familiar with their surroundings, I had never been there before.  In order to function well as leader, I needed a reasonable amount of sleep and I was assigned the cottage farthest from most of the activities so that I could rest.  After our Friday evening snack and a game, I was taken out to the faraway cottage by one of the older teenagers with a large flashlight.  We trekked for some time through the woods that he was familiar with and I was let into the cottage.  It was dark.  We tried a light switch, the family hadn’t been to the cottage much that summer and they had turned the electricity off.  No matter, I was there to sleep.  While young Ken was there with his flashlight, I rolled out my sleeping bag, propped up my pillow and said good night.  Ken went back to the main cottage … with the flashlight.

I suppose it was five minutes after Ken left that I “heard” the silence.  It was deafening.  Then I realised that I was alone in a forest by a lake and it was pitch black.  I couldn’t see a thing.  So I lay there thinking, “this is awkward.”  I heard a noise outside.  “What’s that?” I wondered.  Then silence again.  Thoughts came to me of some of those slasher, youth-camp-horror movies that were popular in the 1980s.  The darkness was foreboding and sleep elusive.  I needed a light in that cabin.  The minutes seemed like hours.  I tossed and turned in the dark.  The first glimpse of dawn brought some relief, but it also brought the woodpeckers.  Their constant ra-tat-tat-tat was relentless.  I could see my watch now, 4:55, 5:00, ra-tat-tat-tat; 5:15, 5:30 ra-tat-tat-tat … there was no hope for me that weekend.  The darkness then the woodpeckers, but it was mostly the darkness that left me feeling uneasy.

There is something about darkness.  It can be uncomfortable, ominous, foreboding.  We prefer light.  Old Celtic tradition lined up stone monuments such as New Grange or Stonehenge to somehow harness the power of sunrise and sunset on the longest night of the year.   Old European traditions used special candles and Yule logs around the winter solstice to recall the light.  The meaning may have been lost but perhaps we continue those traditions as we place lights on trees and outside our homes for December and Christmas.  It’s almost as if darkness rules but we want to overcome it.

I don’t think that it’s an accident that Jesus’ birth is celebrated during the darkest part of the year.  After all, when one reads through the Gospel accounts, many of the events seem to take place in darkness.  The shepherds were watching their flocks by night.   The wise men were following a star, we assume, at night.   Joseph thwarted Herod’s evil plan and fled with Mary and the newborn by night.   Phillips Brooks picked up on this theme in O Little Town of Bethlehem when he wrote “Yet in thy dark streets shineth…”

Darkness is a big factor in the Christmas story and particularly so for the apostle John.  John’s Gospel is much less concrete than Matthew and Luke with their talk of stables and mangers, and shepherds and wise men.  John is much more theologically complex.  John has thought and pondered Jesus’ arrival.  He looks at the world he comes to and sees darkness.  “Darkness,” in John, takes on moral overtones.  It symbolizes ungodliness, evil, and chaos.   For John the world was a dark, scary, unhappy place, a world without God.

In early September, I travelled to my home-town of Belfast, this time via Paris.  I had never been to Paris but for a few days I was able to take in the Musée d’Orsay, the beautiful Cathédrale Notre Dame, Le Louvre, and Le Tour Eiffel.  On the last day I went into the old Jewish Quarter and then walked north to within a block of the now infamous Bataclan Theatre.  I think it was because I had been in that region only weeks before that I felt the pain of the November 13th Paris attacks so acutely.  I couldn’t believe what was happening as I watched CNN’s coverage.   I continue to be astonished at minds that can walk into crowded rooms filled with someone’s child, someone’s loved one, someone’s mother or father and spray the bullets of automatic weaponry at unsuspecting, unarmed individuals.  The terrorism that I had grown up with in Belfast seemed almost civil in comparison.  After all, most terrorists in Belfast would call in a bomb threat so that they would take out buildings but not people.  But this is the world we are now living in.  Human life seems meaningless.  Without warning 3,000 homes are bereaved in 9/11.  Madrid felt the pain in 2004, London in 2005, Mumbai in 2008, and there are more.  Perhaps we have been spared the likes of a world war over the last seventy years but these and horrendous situations in Sri Lanka, Rwanda, Sarajevo, Chechnya, Iraq, Syria and with ISIS lead me to wonder if darkness is really the ruler of human hearts.  John it seems is right when he says, “People loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil.”

Due to the Paris attacks, I remember feeling quite down-hearted about the state of the world in the latter part of November.  I was, however, teaching a Bethel class and in the Bethel material I came across encouraging words.  Words that just jumped out at me and assured me that darkness is not the end.  Pastor Harley Swiggum, who wrote the Bethel material, says that the darkness has been challenged.  Herod, Nero, Hitler, and Stalin may believe that their evil can triumph over good yet they have all fallen and the word of Christ still lives.  In Christ, a light still shines.   As Queen Elizabeth said in her annual Christmas Day speech, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”  Both Harley Swiggum and the Queen quote John’s Gospel, “The true light that enlightens everyone was coming into the world.”   No amount of terror or violence or war or ungodliness, or immorality, or dark behaviour will overcome the light.

So “light” is another of John’s favourite words.  He uses light also symbolically in association with the coming of the messiah.  There’s something very special about the messiah for John.  We get a glimpse of its distinctiveness when he connects the word “light” with the word logos, or, the Word of God.  By “light” John means that Jesus was a revelation of God like no other.  With Christ, God’s very Word is before us.  Christ, he says actually is “the Word of God.”   It’s as though he embodies God’s Word and reveals the character and being of God like no other.

It’s very popular these days to hear people inferring that Jesus isn’t unique that he reveals a way in the midst of many ways to God.  There’s a wonderful passage in John 14 that gets used quite often in funerals about Jesus going away to prepare a place for us with God.  As the chapter reads on Thomas asks, about the place and how we get there.  Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father but by me.”   I can’t tell you how many times families in funeral planning will want the first few verses of chapter 14 in a service for their loved one but will reject the next few verses.  There’s this notion that they do not wish to offend others by hinting that Jesus may be the way.  Beyond that there’s the idea that they themselves stand above scripture and dictate what it is that Christian faith is.

It’s been interesting to me how cultural perspectives and individual perspectives stand above scripture these days.  We read passages Sunday after Sunday in church and say, “The Word of the Lord … thanks be to God,” and yet when culture dictates something else, we let culture win.  If we read John carefully, however, Christ is the light, God’s light coming into the world.  There is a uniqueness to Jesus.  Christ’s relationship to God was unique.  His ability to provide knowledge of God and insight into God was matchless.  Christ has no counterpart.  He was “the true light which enlightens everyone was coming into the world.”

There was a very popular teacher in the Judaism of Jesus’ day named John the baptist, and John the apostle stresses how the baptist was sent by God to bear witness.  The baptist had many followers but John goes to great lengths to specify that John the baptist was not the light but came to bear witness to the light.   It is only Jesus whom he directly links with God.  The world may be a dark place but in Jesus Christ, John saw the light of God dawning.  In a unique way, God was entering our time and space.  “The true light that enlightens everyone was coming into the world.”  Jesus is the way, if we have eyes to see (but John adds people loved darkness rather than light).

One of my favourite reads of this past year has been Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See.  Doerr winds his theme around the Second World War and the lives of two people, a blind French girl, Marie Laure and a poor German orphan named Werner Pfennig.  Their lives are tied together by radio broadcasts from Marie Laure’s uncle’s home in St. Malo, Brittany.  The “light we cannot see” has many connections in Doerr’s plot, but near the end of the book, Doerr focuses our thoughts.  Marie Laure, now an old woman, was walking with her grandson in Le Jardin des Plantes.  Her grandson, Michel, is distracted as they’re walking, distracted by a video game playing against an opponent who is another place.  Marie Laure reflects on the waves travelling in and out of Michel’s machine and how they criss-cross around the world to this person and that.  She thought of the waves of “light we cannot see,” the “light” that was transmitted on radio waves long ago during the war.  She ponders the “light” that is now television, mobile phone conversations, texts, and the internet.  She ponders the vast networks of fibre and wire above and beneath the city, the wires and waves that pass through buildings, arc between transmitters, and between antennae atop buildings.  Millions and millions of messages going here there and yonder.  Thousands of messages we cannot see: “can you pick up avocados for dinner,” market updates, advertisements, fifty thousand “I love yous” in any given moment.  They are messages we cannot see but yet they are there.  Messages awaiting the right receiver to help us.

I think Anthony Doerr and Marie Laure tapped into something similar to the apostle John.  John is saying, “God is out there.  He is revealing himself.  We cannot see.  We walk in darkness and live in the darkness without him.  But Jesus is the “light.” Jesus is the revealer.  Jesus is the receiver that brings God and the things of God into our vision.  Not just any light, “the true light that enlightens everyone was coming into the world.”

If you read further in All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr’s Marie Laure keeps reflecting on all the messages that are travelling in the airwaves and through wires - all the light that we cannot see.  She thinks again of her uncle’s radio transmitter and the light it shed to the French resistance and how those messages travelled from St. Malo to Paris, over battlefields and tombs, over the Ardennes, over the Rhine, over Belgium and Denmark and Germany and England.  We may not see this light but it is still there and Marie Laure ponders, “Is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel similar paths just beyond our ken?”  Marie Laure reflects on the important people in her life, her father, her uncle Etienne, her friend Madame Manec and the German boy Werner Pfennig.  She wondered if they too might harry the skies in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings.  She wondered if great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely.

Doerr’s Marie Laure is wondering if there is more to life than this.  She is wondering if there’s a light of life out there that is just beyond our sensory vision.   Again, Marie Laure connects with the apostle John who also connects light and life.  John wrote, “In him (Jesus) was life, and the life was the light of all people.”   Light and life are even a part of the context of that famous verse “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.”   The light of Christ brings more than just knowledge of God into this dark world, it brings a hope, a hope that this physical being we have is not all there is.  It brings a hope that no matter what happens in this life, there is a future with God.  This is what has made the gospel so attractive.  This is what has made Christmas and Easter such great festivals in the Christian experience.  Though this world may be a dark place, though there be evil men and women, terrorists, people of violence and immorality, the light of Christ still shines and will guide you on to eternal life. if we will let it.  There is light out there that we cannot see. “Awake O sleeper,” say St. Paul, “arise from the dead and Christ himself will give you light.”

The main stain glass window in our sanctuary is one of the finest depictions of William Holman Hunt’s painting, The Light of the World.  Holman Hunt was one of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.  Along with a few others, he paid greater attention to detail than many of his contemporaries.  He painted with vivid colours and elaborate symbolism.  He first painted The Light of the World in the 1850s.  That version hangs in the side chapel of Keble College, Oxford.  So much was the painting liked, however, that he painted another version later in life, a larger, life-sized version.  That painting toured the world and was part of an exhibit at the King Street Art Gallery in this city in 1905.   The painting caused a stir in Canada.  Its presence in the city was the impetus for a number of stained glass portrayals of it.  The one before you is one of the finest, commissioned by the Eaton family and produced by Robert McCausland.  It was dedicated at the opening service of the Church on Dec. 20, 1914 and has been a part of TEMC visual ambience for worshippers every Sunday since.

The painting and stained glass are wonderful depictions of Jesus standing outside a door.  The growth around the door suggest that the door has been closed for a long time.  The door has no handle and can only be opened from the inside.  The door is the human soul, your soul, and only you can open to Jesus, the light of the world.  The inscription bears John’s words from Revelation 3:20, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.”

Things may not be clear to you.  You may feel as though you live this life in darkness, groping, feeling, trying to get some insight into what it’s all about, not knowing what is really out there and what is to come.  There are a lot of things out there that we cannot see.  Marie Laure was thinking about some of them.  The apostle John tells us that Jesus brings the light of God into some of the deepest questions and darkness we experience.  The question is, will we, will you open the door?  …Take a look at John’s Gospel and let the light shine in.