Light of the World.

John 8.12-30.  (July 5, 2015)

I.

Part of the Sukkoth festival in Jerusalem was the lighting of four large, high, bright lamps in the main courtyard of the Temple.  Contemporary accounts tell us that these lights could be seen from everywhere in the whole city and even the surrounding countryside.  There were also many smaller lights shared among the people.  It was like a giant candlelight service of spectacular beauty.

So, just like Jesus earlier reinterpreted another part of the festival, the bringing of water from the pool of Siloam up to the Temple, he also builds on this light ritual when he proclaims, “I am the light of the world!  Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”

He presents again this alternative between our normal existence, which he calls walking in darkness, and the life of his disciples, who walk in the light.  These are two substantively different ways of being in the world.  Walking in darkness means being driven by fear, anger, and shame, resorting to threats and violence in an existence characterized by competition, strife, selfishness, desire, and the need to control.  Discipleship, on the other hand, has to do with knowledge of the truth through the Word of God, when we seek to become nothing so God’s love may flow unobstructedly through us into the world.  We become one with that love and so one with everything made by that love, and we are freed from the prison of our own ego-centric personalities.

But for people who do not see this, it is incomprehensible.  So anyone who talks this way, like Jesus, has to be silenced.  So the Pharisees, the organization of religious authorities most interested in maintaining the Law, attack Jesus.  “You are testifying on your own behalf; your testimony is not valid.”  So they are charging him with what we would call a conflict of interest.  To them, Jesus is self-centered, arrogant, conceited, and blasphemous… not to mention mentally ill.  I mean really, who goes around saying stuff like this?  “I am the light of the world”?  “Eat me and live forever”?  Talk about a megalomaniac!  Everything is all about him!  Who made him God?

  And from the perspective of people dwelling in the darkness they have a point.  Jesus seems crazy, as does anyone who talks about a different consciousness and reality.  It is like trying to describe colors to someone who is color-blind, or music to a deaf person.

You know how when we relate a funny story and the person we’re telling it to doesn’t get it, and we finally just have to say, “Well, I guess you had to be there”?  This is how Jesus responds.  “I know where I have come from and where I am going, but you don’t,” he says.  “You all can only judge by the standards of your limited level of consciousness, in which you have no access or way of understanding what I am talking about.  I do not judge or even care about those standards.”

II.

In other words, Jesus’ life has to be experienced directly.  Just talking about it from outside, supposedly objectively, without being involved in it, is pointless.  He doesn’t judge anyone in that way, he says.  He doesn't place himself above others and evaluate their performance; he doesn't grade people according to how meticulously they keep the law; he doesn’t condemn anyone as if he were their superior, because he knows there are no such hierarchies in human life.  All of us are equals under God and in God.  The only judge and evaluator is God, the eternal Father who sends Jesus Christ into the world.

The truth is not a democracy.  The testimony of one person who can see is more valuable than that of a hundred blind people.  Just as we cannot repeal the laws of physics by majority vote, which some people today actually imagine they can do, neither can we repeal or overturn the truth of God’s saving love revealed in Jesus Christ.  He comes into the world to plug us into the living presence of God.  His testimony is not true because it is corroborated by a multitude of witnesses; his testimony is true because it comports with God, who is Truth itself.  It is corroborated by the whole creation.

Jesus is trying to break us out of our sleepwalking, blind, dark, limited existence.  He is trying to jump start us to another level of consciousness where we see ourselves and our world much more clearly.  But too often this does not happen and we think he is just referring to himself.  So we worship him like he is some kind of religious celebrity, when in reality Jesus is the Son of God and the Son of Man, that is, he is the One who reveals both true divinity and true humanity.  

These come together in him… but they also come together in us.  Jesus shares true humanity with us.  Only in us, our true humanity is obscured, hidden, buried, and forgotten.  But it is still there, deep within.  Jesus wants to awaken us and enlighten us about ourselves, who we truly are as God created us.  His purpose is to show how through the true humanity we share with Jesus we also participate in the true divinity he shares with God.  

This is what the early church means by the rather audacious claim that “God became human so that humans might become God.”  If we don’t get this — and few of us do — then we are just messing around with superficial religion.  We’re just having wonderful, beautiful ceremonies, like this one with the lights at Sukkoth in Jerusalem.  If we do break through to this consciousness, then we are talking about engaging with eternal life in the Spirit.  Then instead of looking at the pretty lights, we become one with the light itself.  We become the light of the world, even as he is the Light of the World.

III. 

The Pharisees then ask, “Where is your father?” apparently imagining that he is talking about his earthly father who may be found somewhere else.  The fact that they can ask this indicates that they do not understand what he is talking about, for the Father to whom he refers is God, who is everywhere, whom Jesus has come into the world to reveal.

Jesus just sighs and says, “If you knew me you would know my Father also.”  Because he is the perfect vessel through whom the Father, God, is revealed.  

This fact is validated by experience.  It is not something we must only take Jesus’ word about.  That is where we have to start, but then his word must become flesh in the sense of being applied and tested in our own experience and actions.  

Jesus continues.  He says, “I am going away, and you will search for me, but you will die in your sin.  Where I am going you cannot come.”  It reminds me of the futile ways in which we search for Jesus or God according to the limitations of our own thinking.  Like when we search for “the historical Jesus,” and then find a historical, mortal human, and decide that this invention of our own imagination is the only “real” Jesus.

But to search for Jesus as if he were a historical artifact, an object of our research, a thing we can put under a microscope and observe or pin on a table to dissect, is to miss the point and remain mired in sin, which is to say, caught in separateness, enmity, and violence.  To search for anything in this way is to kill it so that what we find is a corpse, not a living soul, something we have disassembled and left in broken pieces, not something we may have a conversation with.  

That’s why here Jesus is beginning to talk about his cross, when the religious and political authorities will finally catch and kill him, though they will never truly find him.  They will turn him into an object, treat him like a thing to be disposed of, which is the way they treat the whole world anyway.  It is the way the powers and principalities treat creation and people, as objects to be exploited and thrown away.    

There on the cross Christ will be lifted up in the ultimate revelation of God’s truth, condemning and dooming those very authorities that thought they were winning.  That is when he will give his life for the life of the world, when he will take away the sin of the world as the sacrificial Lamb, when he empties himself completely, so that God’s eternal life and peace may emerge in him in his resurrection.  He will draw and unite all things to himself, and his blood, which is his life, will cover and renew the whole creation.

IV.

On his cross the limited and enslaved perceptions of our blind consciousness will be exhausted.  The powers of evil will have done their worst, and that will prove to be not just ineffectual, but counterproductive.  It becomes the means by which God achieves the ultimate victory over sin, death, and evil.  The power of Rome and the authority of the religious elites will be neutralized.

The way of the cross is this experience of self-emptying; it is the way of repentance, that is, acquiring a new mind, the mind of Christ, which is a radically open, generous, receptive, and transparent mind.  The way of the cross means letting go of our old self, our old, limited, constricted consciousness, our old, narrow loyalties and allegiances, our old blindness and fear.  It is a way that the Pharisees and others who are “from below” cannot follow.  They are from this world and their values and habits and memories and hopes are all conditioned by this world, this human-corrupted world of fear and force.  The idea of letting go is inconceivable to them; the notion of taking up a cross is an absurd and ridiculous horror to anyone committed to “working within the system.”  Therefore, they will die in their sin; that is, they will die still languishing in the darkness of their own blindness, still holding on to their limited, unconscious existence as if it is the only life possible.

Jesus offers life.  But the life he offers requires us to see the tombs in which we have been subsisting destroyed.  He means the tombs in our heads, which are the ideas and beliefs by which we function, and he means the tombs in our world which are the institutions and relationships we have generated to govern our common life.  It all has to go, he says.  Those tombs need to be declared empty.  They don’t contain us.  We are somewhere else now.  We will see him act out this story on our behalf in chapter 20.

So we have to ask ourselves, Can we follow him?  Can we go where he is going?  The text says that “as he was saying these things, many believed in him.”  Many who were listening that day placed their trust in him, which must mean that they joined his movement and committed themselves to living like him, according to his commandments.  According to his love.  

Here is something worth dying for.  That is what he was asking, let there be no doubt.  Jesus is calling us to die with him.  This does not necessarily mean actually having our physical body killed, though of course that does happen.  But the people, some of them anyway, realize that here is an opening, a connection, an interface with God.  Here is something more profound and functional than the usual things teachers were saying, which was Keep the Law!  It’s not that Jesus was counseling that they break the Law.  But he was giving them access to the One who gave the Law in the first place.

V,

Jesus Christ is the Light of the world.  It is only when we live according to his teaching and example that we are able to see what is truly out there.  He illuminates the world beyond our closed-minded blindness and the darkness of our preconceptions, beyond our fear and anxiety.  He shows us, and more importantly, connects us and engages us and immerses us in, what is true and real.

Because we have come to see everything and everyone through the love of God revealed in Jesus, we are able to give up our old limited ways of thinking and acting, and live instead according to the forgiveness, liberation, healing, peace, goodness, and justice we know in him.  Because in trusting him, we are trusting in the God who makes and restores and renews and redeems all things.

In him our own true humanity has come to us revealing in our own souls the presence and love of God.

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