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December 26, 2004
Jesus Christ, Light from Light
Jesus Christ, Light from Light
Psalm 43 / Isaiah 42: 5-9
John 8: 12
December 26th, 2004
Newsweek magazine’s final pages of the last issue were called “Final Bows.” Last year, President Reagan took his final bow at the ripe age of 93, after a long spell with Alzheimer’s disease. Had he been able to see the way ahead as an undergraduate at Eureka College, in Illinois, to glory days as a beloved president, if he had had any choice I suspect he might have bartered that painful, private decade for the love he evoked from our country. He would have smacked his lips. “Can’t wait!” But of course, he had to wait, and also of course, he could not see ahead.
Christopher Reeves also died, though far earlier in life, as a consequence of one day’s horse ride in 1995 that changed the course of his life. He went from playing Superman to being a real-life helpless paraplegic. He couldn’t see the way ahead to a destiny that now seems to many the definition of his life far more than his movies as Superman.
I mused as I read those familiar names and others that none of us can see into the darkness ahead. It might make us over-confident if we could, or it could be pretty scary.
We read together this morning the 43rd Psalm. It was a prayer as much as a Bible reading when we said together, “Oh send out thy light and thy truth; let them lead me, let them bring me to thy holy hill and to thy dwelling.”
Those words begin with the little exclamation, “Oh!” But the Hebrew doesn’t include the word “Oh!” There it’s a command to God. The translators tapered down the command, making of it a plea, out of courtesy to God. We cannot command God. So we say, “Oh, please, God, send out your light and let it lead me. Let me see the way ahead, and please let it be good.”
There are a number of Scriptures I would have liked to have us read and listen to this morning, but I could only choose three to remind us that God has shed light on the way ahead. In the chapter before our Old Testament reading, God speaks to us as He told ancient Israel, “I have chosen you and not cast you off; fear not, for I am with you, be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my victorious right hand.”
In the chapter following the one Sergey read for us God reminds us that when we go through the deep waters or through the fire, two very opposite kinds of trial, He is right there with us. We will not drown. We will not be consumed by the fire. He is there. He promises us He will be there.
Then you heard Sergey read for you, “I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind . . . Behold the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them.” I remember that Sergey and his family now look to God to show them the way ahead. I hope you hear God’s promise to you, “I give you light for the way ahead.”
We read aloud together Jesus’ words, “I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” Oh, so we have to follow such light as we are given. Light can be wasted.
Earlier in John we read of Jesus, “The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world.” We wonder what that means. The Quakers accept this teaching of Jesus that puzzles us as a cornerstone of their theology. Most of us don’t know what it means. How did Jesus enlighten Saddam Hussein, or Joseph Stalin, or Scott Peterson? They must have wasted their light.
More personally, I wonder how has Jesus enlightened me? I sure don’t feel enlightened often enough. I look ahead to my ministry here and I pray, “Lord, show me the way. Show us what you want us to be.”
A cornerstone of my faith is that there’s more going on than any of us can see. Light comes in particles or wave lengths imperceptible to my eyes and yours. God leads us through dry times and these are part of the way. When Israel wandered forty years in the desert, this was in the plan of God for them. God’s way is not always through “shady green pastures.”
I chose to speak of these things this morning because I decided last year to let the Nicene Creed guide our thoughts for a while. And with interesting timing the next phrase before us describes Jesus as “light from light.” I didn’t know my duty would be to speak of Jesus in this way on the threshold of a new year.
The early Christians who described Jesus as “light from light” lived in days when their destiny seemed much brighter than it had been fifteen years earlier. Christianity emerged from the darkness of persecution into the light of being the most favored religion of the Roman Empire. But I don’t think this was in their minds when they so carefully described Jesus as “light from light.”
They had one purpose for sure, to define Jesus as the “true light,” because this was the kind of light He was. As we read in John 1: 9, “He was the true light.” They called Him, “light from light,” to make clear He was different from that false light, the disguise that Satan adopts as an “angel of light.” Satan’s “light” came from darkness. Satan’s light was a luminous veneer spread on a very dark heart. The kind of light the powers of darkness shine before us doesn’t reveal terrible consequences from following its allure. How many people wring their hands and say, “If only I had not!” as they think of what they did in response to what seemed a bright, golden opportunity.
In Proverbs we read, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but the ends thereof are the ways of death.” “The way of the wicked is as darkness.” But this darkness seems like light at the moment. Opportunity seems to blaze with light at the moment, but oh, the consequences of following that false light.
Jesus was not that kind of light, a light hiding darkness. He is light from light. His kind of light appeared in this world at the beginning when God said, “Let there be light.” John wrote of Jesus as this kind of light, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.”
There is an instructive mixing of the verb tenses as John wrote this. Jesus as the light “shines,” which means that this light is always shining--in the present. “The darkness did not overcome it” seems to describe a past action.
But it means something different from that. Practically speaking we might realize this because darkness is always trying to overcome the light. You and I can testify to this in the way that we see the battle in ourselves between light and darkness, good and evil, a dark side battling a light side. With Paul we admit, “The good I want to do, I don’t do, and what I don’t want to do is what I do!” The Gospel is telling us that the darkness will never win over the light of Jesus.
The early Christians who wrote down this so-detailed description of Jesus, wanted to make sure that we would distinguish between the seeming light that really is a disguise of darkness, and the real light, the light that can never be overcome by darkness—that is Jesus.
But this was more than a definition of Jesus, based on the Scriptures statements about Him. It was also an expression of hope. I think of them looking ahead into an unknown future.
They didn’t know that after four hundred years of the penetration of the Christian faith into North Africa and even into the barbarian West that a new religion would arise in Arabia that would threaten to stamp out Christianity. In the early 8th century Islam swept across North Africa, once the most vigorous region of the Christian faith. If Charles the Hammer had not pounded successfully on the Muslim armies in France in AD 732, the light of the Gospel would have faced a real challenge to fulfill the words of the Gospel—the darkness did not overcome the light.”
These early Christians didn’t think about a political, military challenge to the light of Jesus. They had seen how the Faith of Jesus Christ grew in brightness during the darkest days of persecution. Its apparent powerlessness was stronger than the mighty religions favored in the Roman Empire. As we have seen in our generation the resurgence of the Faith in China and Russia demonstrates that the light of the Gospel will not be extinguished.
But I wonder if there was something deeper than this that these early Christians had in mind, something more personal. When you and I come to Jesus by faith, I doubt that many of us have in mind the broad sweep of history, or the technicalities of correctly describing Jesus. We want to feel this light for ourselves.
Even though the Gospel tells us that Jesus was the light that enlightens everyone, we do not always feel an inward confirmation of this truth. Often we live in hope. As Paul tells us, faith, hope’s ally, is more like blindness than like sight. How often the turn of phrase comes to me, “faith is a special kind of blindness.” I trust in God though I cannot see ahead.
The anxieties that affect our faces, changing the optimistic brightness of youth into the pessimism of later years, writing fear and sometimes anger across our foreheads, and putting distress into the lines of our faces, and into our very eyes--are the effect of the darkness we cannot penetrate.
It’s well and good that Jesus is light from light, the true light, and all of that, but I cannot see the way ahead, and I’m scared. There are clues that come to us all that the way ahead isn’t all a spiral upward into glory.
I notice a couple changes in my body that the last decade has brought. I used to be a nearly tireless runner. I could run for miles, and stopped mostly because it was boring. I passed on this endurance gene to our son who has run the Chicago Marathon. But now my knees threaten to quit on me. I can’t run. Gimpy old knees, you know. My eyes once could read fine print. Now I can’t seem to get glasses that really do the trick. Cataracts have begun to form, the eye-doctor tells me. In some ways I feel like I’m still in my thirties. But I have a few reality-check points.
We all know the last advice in the book of Ecclesiastes: “Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw nigh, when you will say, “I have no pleasure in them.” It goes on to describe how our body parts fail us, one by one. First our eyes, then osteoporosis, and then our teeth drop out, our ears fail, and finally, “the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the Spirit to God who gave it.” All of this happens to us, who have an insatiable appetite not only to live, but also to be forever young.
A lot of plastic surgeons are getting rich promoting the make-believe that a scalpel, a hypodermic needle, and a suction tube can turn back the body clock. Health clubs rake in many people’s extra dollars as they buy memberships they hope will make them slim and trim. If only buying a membership could do the trick!
At midnight next Saturday, we put up a new calendar. What will the year bring? We don’t know any details. Maybe it will go well for us. Maybe ill will come to some of us. But the light Jesus shines into our lives offers a hope more sure than any passing detail of life can extinguish. The Apostle Paul wrote, “I have learned to be abased and to abound. I have learned in whatever state I am therewith to be content.” We’d not like to reproduce personally many of the situations in which he learned to be content. We hope for better than this.
Come what may, train yourself to look steadily at the light of Jesus. You and I cannot actually see light. We just see what light makes it possible to see.
John Henry Newman’s life-story was of great influence on me in a pivotal time of my life when the way ahead seemed very dark. He could be helpful to me because his way seemed very dark to him. I have had since I was a young man a deep sense of longing for God that made life feel like wandering through a labyrinth. It was while returning to England from a trip to Rome in which He searched for God’s direction and peace that he prayed words that many people have sung as a plea to God:
Lead kindly light amid the encircling gloom. The way is dark and I am far from home. Lead thou me on. Keep thou my feet. I do not ask to see the distant scene. One step enough for me.
We should probably all learn this hymn. Its tune is not the kind many people favor today. When we cannot see our way ahead, God lets us look through the prism of other peoples’ life experiences. We see they made it through times as perilous as our own. And they show us that blind faith, hope, and trust in God is actually shining a light before us, even when all light seems to have faded before us.
I pray that God will give you and me enough eye-sight to see the ray of light He shines before us all, just enough for the next step. We must leave to God’s care the steps after that. Let us move on together into the year before us, trusting God to show the way individually and as a congregation.
O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come. Be thou our guide while life shall last and our eternal home. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at December 26, 2004 09:30 AM