by CCW | 12 December 2018 20:10
This is the second of two Advent meditations on Christ, the Light of the World. The first is posted here[1].
Part Two:
In keeping with the Advent theme of this Sunday and week, we continue to ponder “the things written for our learning,” especially the image of Christ as “the light of the world.” The Christian Faith has this character to it. There comes into the world an idea so real and so totally true that it carries with it its own repudiation and rejection and makes that part of the reality of its own fullness and truth. This is what we have been exploring in terms of the remarkable statement by Christ that he is “the light of the world.”
”He came unto his own and his own received him not.” His own is not simply Israel but all of us in the confusions of our sins, in the darkness of our minds, in the vanity of our lives. “And this is the judgment that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does what is true comes to the light, that it may be closely seen that his deeds have been wrought in God” (John 3.19-21).
”I am the light of the world”, Jesus says, “he who follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life” (John 8.12,13). As Hans Urs Von Balthasar puts it, we do not “think by the light of reason into the darkness of mystery”; rather we think “in the light of the mystery of faith by which we illuminate the darkness of the world”.
The Christian faith takes absolutely seriously the freedom of the will. To take seriously the freedom of the will means to acknowledge the capacity in us all for the refusal of the light. It means a negative definition of ourselves; defining ourselves negatively means defining ourselves against the light of God; in short, to will the darkness – “men loved darkness rather than light”. More strongly put, it means, hating the light both for ourselves and for others. The will to nothingness is the blindness of the soul in the presence of the light. It marks the refusal to be turned to the light, the refusal to be drawn into the light. Such negative definitions of ourselves are a form of denial. It is light refused. Yet Christ is the light refused who uses our refusals to bring us into the light of his presence.
We continue our examination of Jesus as the light of the world by looking at the second passage in which Jesus identifies himself explicitly as “the light of the world”, namely, John 9.5. It accompanies and is part of the story of a healing, the healing of the eyes of the man who was born blind. As with the first story of the woman taken in adultery, so here, too, there is debate and argument.
This second scene in which Jesus identifies himself as “the light of the world”follows directly upon Chapter Eight in John’s Gospel. Here, too, the image of light emphasizes enlightenment rather than simply judgment. “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents but that the works of God might be made manifest in him”. That is a powerful check on the forms of our modern Manichaean moralism by which I mean our predilection to divide the world between us and them which assumes a kind of cosmic dualism. It is a check, too, on our judgmentalism. If you are suffering or suffer from a disability, you must have done something wrong, it is sometimes argued. Here Jesus turns the reality of human suffering understood in that way on its head. It becomes instead the context of God’s greater purpose for our humanity in and through the very mixed realities of human suffering. The man born blind does not necessarily mean some sort of fault or sin in him or his parents. That he was born blind does not mean that he is always to be blind.
We are reminded of something more than the immediate, finite realities of our situations. In a way, Christ’s words echo the words of The Book of Job over and against the so-called comforters. They recall us to God’s words to Job about the greater and grander purpose of God in creation and human redemption that refuses to be held captive to our assumptions. After all, “where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” Is God to be measured simply by human experience or can God be made known through human experience?
The making manifest, the making known in the light, of the works of God in the one who is healed does not just mean the bestowal of the physical sight of the man who was born blind but his coming to know the one who has healed him. There is more to seeing than seeing! There is understanding and insight. It means the acknowledgment of Jesus as the Son of God become the Son of Man. This opens us out to the profounder meaning of all the miracles of the Gospels but especially the healing miracles. They all belong to the vision of the integrity of our humanity as found in God.
The interrogation that the man and his parents endure at the hands of the Pharisees serves to bring out a deepening awareness of the reality of Jesus. “If this man were not from God, he could do nothing” (vs. 33),he says, who earlier said “whether he is a sinner, I do not know; one thing I know, that though I as blind, now I see” (vs. 25), but to know that is, ultimately, to know Jesus. ‘I was blind, but now I see.’ It could be the Christian theme song were it not for its obvious triumphalist overtones which undermine its intrinsic meaning. This seeing is for all, not for the few over against the many.
“Jesus said to him “Do you believe in the Son of man? And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him? Jesus said to him, You have seen him and it is he who speaks to you. He said, Lord, I believe”. The not-seeing of the Pharisees is the judgment that arises from the refusal to believe the works of God made manifest in the one who was made to see, and made to see over and against the limitations of his physical birth and situation of being born blind. Once again we see something which goes beyond our expectations and the limitations of our thinking.
The story of the woman taken in adultery belongs to the attempt to get at Jesus. She was brought before Jesus not only with the charge about her actions but also with the charge of what the law commanded – death by stoning, a harsh judgement, to be sure, and one which continues to be exercised and practised to the disquiet and shame of our world of UN Rights. But “this was said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him”. Jesus’ immediate response to her accusers and his – for they are both under accusation, she for what she has done, her action, he for who he is, his identity – is to bend down and to write “with his finger on the ground”. We do not know what he wrote in the dust of the ground, only what John tells us he said to the accusers and to the woman.
In the restoring the sight of the man born blind Jesus says, “I am the light of the world” and “as he said this, he spat on the ground and anointed the man’s eyes”. In both there is a making use of the ground, the dust, the earth. It is a telling image. It recalls us to the Genesis story of creation and to the story in Jeremiah about the Potter and the clay. In other words, it recalls us to God and to his will and purpose for his creation.
Something of God is made known in the world and even through the world, even in and through the dust of the ground. It is made known by Jesus being in the world, by his being in the midst, by his being in the place of our judgments and our sufferings. The problem with our judgments and therefore with our actions and our moral lives is that they often arise out of an incomplete sense of our identity. “In thy light shall we see light” calls us to a new vision of ourselves in Christ without which we are left only to the darkness of our desires; a darkness which cannot overcome the light of Christ. Advent brings us to the light which “shineth in the darkness, and the darkness overcame it not.” But that requires our engagement with the one who comes.
The challenge of Christ as light and life to us is seen in the remarkable exchanges, first, between the man whose sight is restored and the Pharisees, second, between his parents and the Pharisees, and, then, with Jesus. These dialogues draw out more fully the meaning of Christ with us and what it means to see light in his light. For without that quality of seeing we are blind but more importantly blind in our sins, blind to the truth of God in Jesus Christ. Christ would have us know who he is and who we are in his sight. He seeks to illumine and enlighten our souls in his light.
After the sequence of exchanges between the man and his parents with the Pharisees, Jesus asks him, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” Why the Son of Man? Because the things of God are revealed through the humanity of Christ, the one in whom our humanity is complete. The man responds first with a question and then with an affirmation. That alone is instructive. First, the man answers Jesus’ question with his own question. “And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.” Jesus makes the remarkable statement that “you have seen him, and the one speaking to you is he.” At that point, the man responds, “Lord, I believe,” to which John simply adds “and he worshipped him.”
That would seem to conclude the whole matter of how we see in the light of Christ, the light of the world. It would seem to conclude the whole matter of how we are illumined. But no. Jesus proceeds to underline the whole point of his coming to us as light. “I came,” he says, “into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” Seeing and unseeing; unseeing yet seeing.
The images recall Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex in terms of the interplay of being blind and yet seeing, and of seeing and yet being blind, and thus not seeing. Oedipus thought he knew who he was and thought that his form of knowing was the only way of knowing. He thinks that he knows who he is but we know that he doesn’t know. The interest of the play is how he comes to know the truth of who he is through learning his self-ignorance. That happens through the encounter with the blind prophet Teiresias who though blind knows who Oedipus really is. It can’t just be a matter of telling him; he does, but Oedipus can’t make sense of it and so invents a rationale – a conspiracy theory – and thus resists the truth until he is able to find out in accord with the pattern of his own increasingly chastened reason the truth itself and to bring the truth and thus himself out into the open. The discovery of who he is leads him to the self-inflicted act of putting out his eyes as the acknowledgment that when he saw he didn’t see. In putting out his eyes he becomes like Teiresias and yet more than Teiresias because of his persistence in wanting to know.
What Jesus highlights at the end of Chapter Nine is the stubborn persistence of the Pharisees in their opposition to him and to what he has done. The healing miracle of bestowing sight upon the man born blind reveals the truth of Christ for us as the light of the world. Almost literally we might say, “in Thy light shall we see light,” which is what the man born blind now experiences and to which he bears eloquent witness. He is an eloquent witness to Christ as the Light of the world.
A prayer of Lancelot Andrewes speaks to our advent meditations on Christ as Light and serves to conclude our consideration of the Light of Christ.
O blessed Lord Jesus Christ, who art the light of the world, Grant that in thy light we may see light, the light of thy grace today and the light of thy glory hereafter, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.
Fr. David Curry
Advent Meditation # 2
December 12th, 2018
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2018/12/12/advent-meditation-christ-light-of-the-world-part-2/
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