The Light of All People
John 1:1-18
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"The Light of All People"
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. 8 He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. 9 The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.
10 He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. 11 He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. 12 But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, 13 who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
14 And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. 15 (John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’”) 16 From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. 17 The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.
-John 1:1-18
Our world today is hundreds of times brighter than it was a century ago – artificial lights from stadiums, to street lights, to smart phones fill our skies and obscure the real lights that would have guided our ancestors.
In 1994 after an earthquake in Los Angeles led to a widespread power outage that left the night sky perfectly dark, a couple people called emergency services to report a suspicious cloud over the city. It turned out to be the Milky Way. We live in a very different world than our ancestors! All the fake lights make it hard to see the real ones.
Before our world was filled with artificial lights, light came from the sky. From the sun. From the moon. From the stars. By these lights, we have warmth and growth, we have day and night.
We have a healthy rhythm to guide our work and our rest. These lights invoke wonder, they give us seasons, they are markers of time, and trustworthy givers of direction. So, in the prologue to John’s Gospel, when he invokes the idea of light to capture the glory of Christ’s advent, it’s an image rich with life and wonder.
Tomorrow the church around the world celebrates Epiphany – the day we mark the arrival of the Magi from the East who came to Bethlehem to worship the Christ child. These wise ones from a foreign nation paid a lot of attention to these lights in the sky, and when, among the thousands of stars overhead, they noticed a new one emerge, they were drawn to follow and find the good news it whispered to their hearts.
Epiphany is the day that the wise ones recognized the Messiah as a baby born in Bethlehem.
Epiphany is the day we celebrate that Christ has appeared to the whole world - the light which enlightens all people.
Now, John’s gospel makes no mention of the Magi. In fact, John doesn’t start with a birth story at all, as do Matthew and Luke. Instead, John starts from the beginning. From the very beginning. From the “in the beginning” kind of beginning. Harkening all the way back to Genesis, John anchors Jesus in the act of creation itself.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and Word was God.
This Word that spoke light into darkness, order out of chaos, separated land from sea, spoke life into humans out of the dust of the ground, organized the cosmos, and then declared it all good -- this Word is life, is light, is God in Jesus Christ.
The Jewish philosopher Abraham Heschel, in his reflections on the nature of faith, observed that “awe precedes faith, it is the root of faith.” This is true in John’s gospel. Here, we are invited to stand in awe at the very beginning, like the Magi who began their journey by looking up to the sky in wonder. The poetry of John’s prologue lifts our hearts, its beauty calls forth praise and invites us to follow - to come and see. A sense of awe is where John wants us to begin this journey of faith.
But John doesn’t leave us looking up in wonder for very long. The poetry of his prologue is abruptly interrupted by the introduction of John the Baptist which draws us from the stars down to earth “there was a man sent from God” he writes, “whose name was John.”
Now, heads not in the clouds anymore, we find ourselves located right in the messiness of human history – in a specific time and place with a certain man who was chosen by God to point the way to the light that was coming into the world. At this intersection of the cosmos and human history, the good news is declared: “the Word became flesh and dwelled among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”
In Exodus, Moses had asked to see God’s glory, but was allowed only a glimpse, because to behold God’s glory was known to be as dangerous as it was dazzling. Most humans didn’t live to tell the tale. When Moses came down from Mt. Sinai after receiving the tablets, the radiant light of God’s glory shone brightly from his own face – so much so that he had to cover it with a veil so the people wouldn’t be frightened.
But now we encounter something entirely and astoundingly new. The light of God’s glory made visible to all people - not high up on a mountain or protected within a temple – but in ordinary human flesh, dwelling among us full of grace and truth for the whole world to see and know and believe.
Perhaps it was the ordinariness of this incarnation that made it hard for so many to recognize it.
Perhaps the world was looking for something flashier and brighter than a human baby born to a humble family.
Whatever the case, John writes that “Although he was in the world, and the world came into being though him; the world did not know him, his own people did not accept him. The light of all people came into the world, but the Word that created the world was not recognized.
It’s a dangerous misreading of this text to understand it as a criticism against the Jewish community – because it’s not just one group of people who struggle to recognize the incarnation, this is a universal question of the human heart, one I’m sure that is familiar to each one of us at various times in our lives.
This week, a commentator on this passage wondered about this struggle to perceive and asked a question that I think resonates: she asks: “how do we see the light today when the darkness feels so pervasive?”
Just this week alone we have anxiously watched what feels like a world racing towards yet another war in the Middle East. We’ve watched as fires have ravaged Australia and we’ve wondered about the future of our planet in a world of climate change.
How do we see the light today when the darkness feels so pervasive?
I cannot tell you exactly what the answer is for you, but I do know that we begin with the promise that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not (and has not) overcome it.
The light has not vanquished the darkness, but it does shines in it and cannot be extinguished.
It’s exactly the darkness into which the light came. Jesus was born into a world as torn by war and violence as the world we walk around in today. His birth was accompanied by the slaughter of the innocents, his earthly life ended on a cross. …And yet, we hear the promise that there is no darkness so dark that it was able to overcome it. Light has always had the last word.
To see the light in this world is an act of faith and a practice of defiance.
As Jesus began his ministry, he issued an invitation to the disciples to “come and see” – the same invitation is issued to us. And when we “come and see” – when we look at Jesus, the light of the world walking around right in the middle of messy humanity – what we see is the love of God in the simple breaking of bread, in the welcome extended to the outsider, in the healing of the sick and in the compassion shown to those who suffer. We see the love of God in the feeding of hungry strangers, in the telling of stories, in the love of community, in the raising to new life. And by the power of the Holy Spirit we still see and know the light of Jesus Christ in these same places today.
As we step into the season of Epiphany tomorrow, may we all, like the Magi, pay attention and learn to see the light in our world – to see the defiant light in our world that continues to insist on grace and truth and love even when the darkness feels overwhelming. And may that light so overflow in us that it sends us out to help the world know it too. May it be so. Amen.