Light and Enlightenment
Have you ever noticed that the expression “the light of the world” is used to
describe the Christ (John 8:12), but that Jesus also applies the same phrase to us?
(Matthew 5:14, “You are the light of the world.”) Few preachers ever pointed
that out to me.
Apparently, light is less something you see directly, and more something by
which you see all other things. In other words, we have faith in Christ so we
can have the faith of Christ. That is the goal. Christ and Jesus seem quite happy
to serve as conduits, rather than provable conclusions. (If the latter was the case,
the Incarnation would have happened after the invention of the camera and the
video recorder!) We need to look at Jesus until we can look out at the world
with his kind of eyes. The world no longer trusts Christians who “love Jesus”
but do not seem to love anything else.
In Jesus Christ, God’s own broad, deep, and all-inclusive worldview is made
available to us.
That might just be the whole point of the Gospels. You have to trust the
messenger before you can trust the message, and that seems to be the Jesus
Christ strategy. Too often, we have substituted the messenger for the message.
As a result, we spent a great deal of time worshiping the messenger and trying
to get other people to do the same. Too often this obsession became a pious
substitute for actually following what he taught—and he did ask us several
times to follow him, and never once to worship him.
If you pay attention to the text, you’ll see that John offers a very evolutionary
notion of the Christ message. Note the active verb that is used here: “The true
light that enlightens every person was coming (erxomenon) into the world”
(1:9). In other words, we’re talking not about a one-time Big Bang in nature or a
one-time incarnation in Jesus, but an ongoing, progressive movement
continuing in the ever-unfolding creation. Incarnation did not just happen two
thousand years ago. It has been working throughout the entire arc of time, and
will continue. This is expressed in the common phrase the “Second Coming of
Christ,” which was unfortunately read as a threat (“Wait till your Dad gets
home!”), whereas it should more accurately be spoken of as the “Forever
Coming of Christ,” which is anything but a threat. In fact, it is the ongoing