When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” (John 8:12)
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. (C.S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?”)
Today’s passage is well known as one of Jesus’ “I
am” statements in John. As I look at it this morning, I return to my theme of
Scripture not being magical. What did He mean when He said He is the light of
the world? What do we mean when we say He is? Not vaguely, kind-of, sort-of,
well… What do we mean?
He told us that we’ll never walk in darkness if we follow Him. That is what He meant. What does it mean to follow Him? In summary,
it means what Professor Lewis said: we need to see everything by that Light.
The problem is that when we’re in pain, angry, unsure,
insecure, lonely, frustrated, tempted, etc., our world shrinks to the size
and shape of the emotion or its cause. We also tend to step into the light so
that our shadow falls across the thing or – worse yet, we pull out our own
flashlight to illumine it. Then, to make things as bad as they can
get, we start teaching others according to what we’ve seen.
This is particularly difficult because we may see something that is there or something that isn’t. It’s far safer to work with the whole of Scripture,
seeing what God has told us from start to finish, than picking a few passages and pretending that our view of them is enough. In other words, if He is the light of
the world, then we must follow where He shows us to go and not go our own way, which
leads to stumbling in the dark (no matter how good we think our own flashlights
are.) And we must follow at every point, not just the ones we like.
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